by Deirdre Bair
Sylvie knew everything about our informal arrangement, and she also knew that Beauvoir had expected her to honor it, which made it all the more upsetting not just for me but for everyone who had known or loved Simone de Beauvoir after Sylvie began to dismantle or destroy everything from Beauvoir’s beloved apartment to the agreement with me and the several others I knew that she had had with writers and filmmakers. In the end Sylvie backed down from her position and I was able to write the book exactly as I felt it needed to be written. But to this day, despite the fact that Beauvoir’s letters to Nelson Algren at Ohio State have been read, used, and even quoted in other books, Sylvie has never allowed any legitimate scholar or writer to read Algren’s letters to Beauvoir, all of which she holds in her possession.
I cannot understand why she still maintains this ridiculous position, but my primary emotion in 1988 was relief that I did not have to see her in person, for fear that my very presence might provoke her to take hostile action. When I thought about it, I concluded that her volatility was actually an indirect benefit, as it led me to think carefully about how I portrayed Sartre and Algren. The content of the Algren letters in conjunction with Sartre’s gave me immense freedom to write about Beauvoir’s relationships with these two men and to write about the letters themselves. Those she exchanged with them were useful for corroboration, validation, and interpretation. They provided background for everything from where she and they were at any given time to what they told each other they were thinking and doing, reading and writing. The letters became one more valued source to ensure the accuracy of my written text.
It was much the same with Beauvoir’s memoirs, which I had read for the first time long before I ever thought I would write about her. Like so many other women, after that initial reading, I was (to use one of her favorite expressions) “totalement bouleversée,” totally blown away. There was so much in them that I could imagine was relevant to women at every stage of life, from bookish awkward teenagers who yearned to break free from stultifying families and expand their horizons, to young adult women trying to sort out human relationships, to mature women who had experienced both successes and failures in life and work and who cast cold hard eyes upon Beauvoir’s decisions in light of their own. There was an unflinching honesty within the four volumes, but when I began to write about her, especially after I conducted so many interviews with the people who knew her best, I thought there was another facet of the memoirs that required exploration and explanation.
In my earlier versions of various chapters, I had praised her for her directness and the way she faced everything head-on, no matter how unpleasant or embarrassing. Now as I wrote, I was questioning her evasion, the degree to which she never told anything truly personal. A prime example was when she told Nelson Algren how difficult it had been to keep him out of the story when she wrote about Chicago in America Day by Day: “I have to find a way of saying the truth without saying it.” I thought this personal element was regrettably missing from the memoirs, because it was what truly defined and explained her. In her written version of her life, she told readers where she went and what she did, what she wrote and what she thought. But she did it all dispassionately, as if she were the observer of her own self. It seemed as if she, the woman Simone de Beauvoir, was the silent secret sharer hidden behind the shadow of Beauvoir the writer. I knew that I needed to probe her evasion. I saw it as the biographer’s task to tell what she left out, and how best to do it was the question constantly before me.
I thought back to my many conversations with Beauvoir, when I would inquire about an event or encounter in her memoirs, and how my questions would inevitably boil down to “Yes, but how did you feel about that?” Her response was almost always the same: first there would be silence while she thought about it, then perhaps a toss of the head, a flick of the wrist, and finally her dismissive answer, always something along the lines of “It happened, it’s life; there is nothing you can do; best to get on with it.” I would not give up and would try to find another way to ask my essential question. “I’ve just told you,” she would say. And down would slam the Lucite curtain.
Thus it was up to me to interpret so many aspects of her life, and that is where the testimony of those who were closest to her became important for what I wrote. In the memoirs she wrote of her “perfect” compact with Sartre: “Our way of life was so exactly what we wanted that it was as though it had chosen us.” Why then, I wondered, when she and Sartre were enjoying an evening in one of their favorite bars with friends and members of their “family,” did she sometimes leave the table and go to sit alone at another table to consume vast quantities of wine and sob uncontrollably? Lanzmann, Bost, Pontalis, Pouillon, and many others observed this behavior and told me about it, how as suddenly as she started to cry she would stop, dry her tears, stand up, shake her shoulders, and return to the group as if nothing had happened. This unhappiness was hardly the image of perfection. Beauvoir also believed that everything about her childhood was dark and black. I could accept those thoughts about the clothing worn by her mother and her aunts but not her family’s apartment, which was filled with light—I had seen it myself, thanks to the current owners. I remembered what Hélène told me: “That is what my sister believed, and you must allow her to have her memory of her life.” And so I thought long and hard about how to explain such discrepancies without inserting myself into the text as the ultimate authority. I called this phenomenon the difference between personal truth and historical reality, and decided that places had to be found for both.
I knew I was not going to write hagiography, but to what degree, if any, should I act as her advocate, or if not that, as her debunker? Finding the proper voice consumed me. I remember trying to puzzle this out over a dinner at the home of Aileen Ward with several distinguished biographers from her famed biography seminar: Frederick Karl, Kenneth Silverman, Carole Klein, and Maynard Solomon. Perhaps because we were dining, we bandied food metaphors about until we concluded that the biographer’s job was to “whet the appetite without providing the full meal.” By that, we agreed, those of us who wrote literary biography should ensure that our readers ended our books by wanting to turn immediately to our subjects’ writings and to read more about the historical times in which they lived.
I have followed this dictum with every biography I have since written, but I was particularly concerned with doing so when I wrote the chapter about The Second Sex. Of the entire book, that is the one I am still not sure works in the way I intended. Instead of giving an explication de texte—a summary of the work—I wrote a history of its evolution, from when Beauvoir first got the idea for it and how she wrote it to how it was received by readers, particularly its impact on American readers. I even gave the evolution of its initial flawed translation by the harassed zoologist H. M. Parshley. In effect, I wrote a capsule biography of her book within the larger biography of her life. My intention was to give the full spectrum of responses to it—from the hostile, bitter, sarcastic, and demeaning to the shock of the new, the recognition among women of common anxieties and concerns. Beauvoir gave them hope as she addressed their questions about how to navigate their private and personal spheres and how to find possibilities for engagement with the larger public world. This chapter is still the one that garners the most interest whenever I am asked to speak about Beauvoir’s life and work. It mirrors the response to all my biographies, from those who say that the best (or worst) thing about my writing is that I never tell readers what to think but expect them to form their own opinions. And the individual writing that draws this divided response most of all is the chapter on The Second Sex.
The writing proceeded smoothly once it became my only occupation, and by mid-1988, I submitted the manuscript to Jim Silberman at Summit Books. I appreciated his insistence that we not rush, that we have the book’s appearance and promotion reflect what he called “the excellence” of the content; rather than hurry its publication
to late 1989, he decided to hold it until the beginning of 1990. Jim believed that the intelligent general reader suffered cabin fever during the darkest winter nights after the holiday season, and the period between January and March was the perfect time for books such as mine. He was entirely correct, for enough readers were interested in an “old Frenchwoman nobody cares about anymore” that they made it a bestseller that won accolades, was widely translated, and remains in print to this day.
Jim selected Ileene Smith, then at the start of her distinguished career, to work with me, and from the beginning it was a meeting of two minds as we pored over every line of the text. We were on a strict deadline, because she was heavily pregnant with her first child. My book and her son entered the world together, and Ileene and I smile every time we reminisce about how she spent her last hours before becoming a mother editing my last chapter.
As the publication process unfolded, I had the better part of a year to think about what I had written. There is always so much more to do once the manuscript leaves the writer’s hands and before it becomes a book. There are photos to select, acknowledgments to write. But I also left for last the very first, and perhaps the most crucial, part of the book: the introduction. I had followed the same practice for the Beckett book, and it became the one true parallel with the Beauvoir biography and with every book I’ve written since. Writing the introduction at the end allows me to express what I think the reader needs to know before delving into the life, to tell what drew me to the subject and why I think an understanding of his or her life is important for insights into the work. Only at the end of the process could I clearly articulate these seemingly straightforward answers.
* * *
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When I give talks at conferences or lectures in classrooms, I am often asked to talk about my aims and intentions when I write biography. With the Beauvoir book, I talk about the struggle to write tellingly while also finding the necessary distance to express myself objectively. Obviously I began as a partisan with a bias, attracted to her life because of respect and admiration for her work. The task was to tell this to my readers while convincing them that I presented a version of a life they could trust. It led me to thoughts of what, if anything, the two biographies had in common and what gave each such a separate identity that neither could serve as a model for how to write any other.
In both cases I felt it was an almost unbelievable privilege to know and write about these two giants of contemporary culture. One could argue that because of Beckett, theater changed irrevocably after Waiting for Godot, and because of Beauvoir, the contemporary feminist movement ignited with The Second Sex. Throughout the seven years I worked with Samuel Beckett, I often thought that if my experiences were ever dramatized, they might fall somewhere between thriller and high drama at one extreme or somewhere between Oscar Wilde’s comedy of manners and Feydeau’s farce at the other. My years with Simone de Beauvoir had me marveling at the courage this daughter of Catholic minor nobility had shown when she broke away to live a life of freedom from social constraints and to write a book that would change the way more than half the human race lived their lives.
I usually tell people that biographers are not supposed to have feelings about their subjects. And then I admit that of course I have feelings—positive feelings—because how could I (or anyone) spend every day and night for all those years with someone for whom I did not feel something, from admiration and respect to genuine affection and perhaps even a kind of love? I know there are biographers who come to disapprove of or even despise the people they write about, but I could never write a book like that. The reader would sense it and would neither enjoy nor respect it. My job while I am writing is to put feelings aside and become Desmond MacCarthy’s “artist under oath.” But when I am finished, I have the freedom to say what I really think, and in the case of these two, a single word leaps immediately to my mind: respect. I respected them, and I did so with unqualified admiration.
Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir had purity of vision, certainty of the rightness of their conduct, the worth and value of their writing. Beckett insisted that “nothing matters but the writing.” Time and again he said, “I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.” Simone de Beauvoir refused to let herself be turned into a monument. She regretted being known as France’s “sacred monster,” but if this dubious distinction meant she had influence among the generations that followed, she was willing to let it stand. For me, Beckett and Beauvoir were role models. I respect their contributions to contemporary culture and society, and with humility, I am grateful for having known them. But I admit that filtering the variety of my experiences and the fervor of my admiration required multiple revisions before I arrived at what I hoped would be a discreet and understated record of the originality and achievement of both writers.
Most biographies of “the greats” don’t appear until after their subjects are dead. It was good that I had no idea this was the custom when, as a brash young woman who thought she was on a mission, I decided to write my first one. Writing each of these books brought so many changes to my own life, and they have influenced all my work between the years when I began to those of the seasoned professional I have become today. No doubt Beckett and Beauvoir were pleased with my enthusiasm, but they also probably thought me amusing and exasperating in equal part.
While I wrote the introductions to each of those biographies, I went through many emotional upheavals as I relived every moment from the long years of researching to the final written words. Approaching each conclusion became an exercise in dread as well as anticipation, so much so that I could barely bring myself to write their concluding passages—a feeling I experienced once again as I struggled with this conclusion, too.
All sorts of emotions resurfaced as I remembered the stunning realization that it was all over. Seven years of spending every single day thinking and writing about Beckett, followed by a decade of doing the same with Beauvoir, had come to an end. It was time to move forward with another life, my own, and it was impossibly hard for a long time. I found myself walking aimlessly from room to room or sitting motionless at my desk, sometimes bursting into tears and sobs that so upset my beloved bulldogs that they put their heads on my knee or pawed at my leg, hoping to comfort me with little whimpers of concern. After a while I knew it was time to stop polishing the copper pots in the kitchen (they always shone when I wasn’t writing and were badly tarnished when it was going well) and get myself going again.
I’ve had similar wanderings about the house lately, for it has not been easy to write about myself. Throughout my writing life, I have always kept myself scrupulously out of everything. I am that curious anomaly, the writer who reveals intimate facts about the lives of others while keeping the facts and events of hers closely guarded and private. Incongruous, perhaps, that I have revealed so much about others while telling nothing of myself, but like Beckett, I believed sincerely that I was “dull and without interest.”
In the biographies, the final question for which I needed an answer was, how does one sum up the achievements of a lifetime? Indeed, as I write this, how do I conclude my journey down the lanes of some of my most fascinating memories? As I wrote both books, I would occasionally leaf through books by some of the writers I called “the greats”: Rousseau, Voltaire, Virginia Woolf, Saint Augustine, Pascal, James Joyce, Montaigne. I always found something in them that spoke to my general condition, and I had a habit of copying their remarks, aphorisms, or definitions into the margins of the notebooks I dedicated to the author I was writing about. I suppose the most fitting conclusion here would be to share the words that rang truest for me most of the time.
Joyce provided an example (one that he cribbed from Flaubert, but never mind) that I followed for everything I wrote: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, i
nvisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” (I did keep myself refined out of existence, but I was never indifferent and didn’t bite my nails; I just picked at my cuticles.) Pascal had the perfect pensée to help me open up and confide my own experiences to the permanence of print. When he thought about how his life was “swallowed up…in the eternity that precedes and will follow it,” he “[took] fright.” When I began to write this bio-memoir, I was, like Pascal, “stunned to find myself here rather than elsewhere…Who sent me here? By whose order and under what guiding destiny was this time, this place, assigned to me?” It led me to ask myself what had ever made me think that Samuel Beckett “needed” a biography and I was the one to write it? Saint Augustine provided the answer for what drew me to Beauvoir: I had become “a question to myself. Not even I understand everything that I am.” And Rousseau gave me hope that sustained me during each biography, but especially within this bio-memoir: “My purpose is to display a portrait in every way true to nature, and the person I portray will be myself. Simply myself.”
If I managed to do that, then I have succeeded, and I am content.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is the book I thought I would never get around to writing, so I want to begin with a grateful nod to my family and the many friends who spent years urging me to do it. Aileen Ward, the distinguished scholar and writer, mentor and friend, to whom this book is dedicated, was among the first. Twenty years ago, I promised to write it as a gift for her eightieth birthday; today I regret that she is no longer here to receive it.