Parisian Lives by Deirdre Bair

Author:Deirdre Bair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

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And so Von and I went to London. I spent long days in working sessions for ICEL and nights and weekends enjoying myself. Jimmy and Tania Stern, Beckett’s friends since the 1930s, invited us to stay overnight at their home, Hatch Manor, in Tisbury, Wiltshire, a gorgeous country house with Calders in the bathroom, Picassos in our bedroom, a Djuna Barnes in the hallway, and first editions all over the place. Jimmy had difficulty walking, so we spent the afternoon sitting on Hatch’s lovely lawn to talk while enjoying the scenery, the very landscape that Constable had painted.

Jimmy expressed concern about the state of my rapport with Beckett. I had told him of the flare-up after the Molly Howe incident, and he told me he had had what he called “several curious exchanges” with Beckett in recent letters. I described what I had written and how upset I was by the reactions of Larry Freundlich and the psychiatrists. Then he asked a question that was both odd and disturbing: if these psychiatric concerns turned out to be even partially valid, and if Beckett raised objections to the book’s publication, would I be willing to withhold it until after his death? I told him I intended to deal with that situation as honestly as I had dealt with the actual writing, and if it became necessary to delay publication, I would do it. I told Jimmy how difficult all this was becoming, and if he had to choose between friendship with Beckett and with me, I would understand why he would choose Beckett. He assured me it would never come to that. I told him we would see. He made me promise that I would contact Beckett in Paris and talk about everything I had written. I promised that I would.

I went to see Tom Maschler at Jonathan Cape because I wanted to tell him what to expect when he received the manuscript and to see if his reaction would be the same as Larry Freundlich’s. Tom had none of the same speculations about Beckett’s mental health. Instead he was intrigued by how I presented the work within the life and how I incorporated information from the several hundred interviews I had by then conducted. It was energizing to talk about content, structure, and technique in such a positive manner. I took copious notes, many of which enriched the final manuscript.

We could not leave England without a visit to Bridget and Brian Coffey in Southampton. We talked until 3 a.m. as I told them what I had written and what had been my two publishers’ vastly different responses to it. They asked questions about topics they thought needed more explanation and detail, they volunteered stories of new memories that came to mind, and they offered suggestions about how best to deal with “prickly Sam” when I got to Paris. They were not nearly as concerned about how he would react to the book’s content as they were about his friends (and now mine) that I had seen in England.

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