A question that appeared to be on the lips of many rival scholars was finally voiced to her in an interview by a local news reporter: “How many times did you have to sleep with Beckett to get this scoop?” So intimate was the result when it was published in 1978 that the academic Beckett industry – the Becketteers as Bair calls them – sought to undermine Bair’s methods. Immediately after their talk was done, she ran back to her hotel room, and using the cards as aides-memoires, wrote down all she could remember of what had been said. Don’t even think of a tape recorder.”īair countered this obstacle by learning the questions she wanted to ask by heart from cue cards before each meeting with Beckett. When Bair, then 36, pulled out a notebook in their second meeting, Beckett jumped up from the cafe table, outraged – the author of Krapp’s Last Tape could not countenance any lasting evidence of his spoken words. What followed was a classic case of that strange dance between subject and biographer for possession of a life.

He initially agreed to “neither help nor hinder” Bair in her efforts, but over the years that followed, he sat down with her many times, helped her to navigate his written archive and introduced her to his legion of friends and acolytes.

Beckett greeted Bair in the lobby of the Hotel du Danube on Rue Jacob, with amused curiosity: “So you are the one that is going to reveal me for the charlatan I am,” he said.

That meeting is the starting point for this insightful and gossipy memoir of a biographer’s voyage around two towering subjects – after spending seven years on Beckett, Bair spent a further decade circling his near neighbour Simone de Beauvoir. He wrote back by return and asked her to come to Paris to see him. Maddeningly for those scholars, Bair had used the most straightforward of means: she simply wrote to the famously guarded Beckett, out of the blue from her home in Connecticut, and set out her proposal. Armed with a recently completed PhD and an abandoned career as a journalist for Newsweek, she persuaded Samuel Beckett to let her write his biography, a prize commission that had been denied to many male Beckett scholars twice her age. I n 1971, Deirdre Bair achieved one of the great literary scoops of our times.

Parisian Lives by Deirdre Bair