“The yawn factor” was a term I invented for what happened during interviews when I was stifling yawns of boredom because people were telling me things I already knew. Even though there were parts of Beckett’s life for which I needed more information before I could write a consistent narrative, by the spring of 1974, I knew it was time to start.
As I began, I read other biographies carefully, studying style and technique as much as content. All I had read to that date seemed to start at the beginning—birth—and end at the end—death. He (for they were still predominantly about men) was born, and then he grew up and did, went, saw, became, and then he declined and died. Full stop and the end of the book.
By April the frenetic activity of the past several months was slowing down enough for me to concentrate more on where to begin than on how. At this point in my brief but ever-growing career as an accidental biographer, I had read fairly extensively in the genre, enough so that I taught with confidence a course at Trinity College entitled “Literary Biography.” In the crash program I created to educate myself to teach others, I began with a survey of the classics: Plutarch, Suetonius, Vasari. I was entranced with the two lives of Charlemagne by Notker and Einhard and enjoyed biographies of Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and John Keats. I read psychobiographies of Freud and Jung, and for reasons I was not then educated enough in that field to understand was dissatisfied with both. However, I did like the economist W. W. Rostow’s psychobiography of James Forrestal for the judicious insights into how Forrestal’s character influenced his public life. I felt I learned from it some interesting methods for crucial insights into Beckett’s writings.
Talking to other biographers was as important as reading. I never missed a meeting of Aileen Ward’s biography seminar, where I profited from discussions of works in progress about Nathaniel Hawthorne (Gloria Erlich), Doris Lessing (Carole Klein), Lillian Hellman (Joan Mellen), Dorothy Parker (Marion Meade), and Victorine Meurent (Eunice Lipton). That was when I first realized the impact that women writers were having on the genre, and I began to read Virginia Woolf’s nonfiction writing with an entirely different eye, as the practitioner rather than the critic. Elizabeth Hardwick’s essays about other writers and their lives and letters broadened my thoughts on how the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction were evolving in ways that I thought might have resonances for the genre of biography. I found myself gravitating to the women writers who were exploring the lives of women through nonfiction as well as biography, among them Nancy Milford (Edna St. Vincent Millay) and Susan Brownmiller, then writing her influential study Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. Alix Kates Schulman had created a literary tsunami when Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen appeared, and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics was inspiring dialogue across every sociopolitical spectrum. In retrospect, I believe they were all subtle, unconscious influences on everything I wrote about Samuel Beckett.
I must have internalized something from every woman’s methods and techniques, but I did not realize I had done so until 2016, when I read Paula Backscheider’s 1991 study of biography, in which she wrote that “feminism permeates” my biography of Samuel Beckett. Initially I was astonished by her assessment, because I was not aware that feminism had been an active concern during the writing. Overall, I am pleased that such an eminent scholar discerned this quality, for as I began the writing, I really had no idea of what I was doing, let alone that I had instinctively created a way of thinking and writing about biography that became the foundation for all my subsequent work.
Having read widely and deeply, I thought I did not want to write one of those traditional biographies. I wanted to do something different, to begin with something exciting, just as Douglas Day had done in his biography of Malcolm Lowry. Day began Lowry’s written life with his death, when he fell up (not down) the stairs in a drunken stupor. In Beckett’s case, I wanted to begin with a fact or event that was the first thing anyone who knew anything about him would think of when they heard his name. Therefore, what better place to start than with Waiting for Godot?
This was an unusual first step for me, because I almost never knew what the first sentence of a piece of writing would be until I arrived at the end (which is still the case). This time I thought I knew exactly how I would begin, with the first sentence Suzanne Beckett said to her husband after he won the Nobel Prize: “Quelle catastrophe!” Then I would proceed to write about the play’s first performance. I was about a page and a half into the first draft when questions and doubts surfaced. I confided all my questions to the DD, starting with how I should insert something about the circumstances of the play’s creation, but before I could do this, how I had to set the scene by telling the reader where Beckett was at the time of inspiration. Or, I pondered, perhaps I needed to stop long enough to explain where he got the name Godot, or address the occasional lines that he borrowed from other writers and what he intended them to convey. And how about letting the reader know the part his wife, Suzanne, had played in all this? Suddenly it was May; a month had gone by and I was nowhere near a cohesive beginning. Starting the life of Beckett at the moment of his great fame was not going to work.
I reluctantly conceded that, novice as I was, perhaps others had the correct approach when they began at the beginning of a subject’s life, so I decided to try it. One week later I had a very rough draft of a first chapter that carried Beckett from his birth to his teen years at the Portora Royal School. When I say “rough,” it does not begin to describe those awkward and fragmented first pages. I may have created a skeleton, but I had very little flesh worth putting upon it.
I knew I needed to return to Ireland to get more information about Beckett’s early life, but the problem was the usual one I faced throughout the writing: where to find the money to pay for the trip. I was officially under contract to Harper’s Magazine Press, but the tiny advance had already been spent. My agent, Carl Brandt, said that the publisher, Larry Freundlich, would not advance more money until I had a significant chunk of writing to show him. Frustrated that I had to stop writing in order to fill out more grant proposals, I counted myself fortunate when the American Council of Learned Societies gave me the small stipend that would let me return to Europe that fall. With relief, I went back to writing.
My most immediate task was the mammoth one of organizing all the information I already had about the Irish years so that I could fill in what I didn’t know when I got to Ireland. I realized that I needed a detailed chronology that would allow me to trace Beckett’s movements and writings day by day, even hour by hour in some instances. But how to lay it all out in some useful form in those pre-spreadsheet days? I was a great fan of small file cards and I had written out chronologies separated by category—education, health, familial relationships, etc. However, I did not have enough space to lay them out and see them all at once; what I needed was a visual calendar, an outline that would enable me to integrate all the topics into a master timeline.
I found the solution in a local five-and-dime store that was going out of business. In a bin I spotted rolls and rolls of white paper that thrifty housewives who kept spotlessly clean homes used to line the shelves in their kitchen cabinets. Since I had never been such a model of midcentury domesticity, my first thought when I saw them was of how Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road: he used one continuous roll of paper that he typed on without having to stop to change the page. I would use mine to write a nonstop chronology of Beckett’s daily existence.
The world knew very little about Samuel Beckett when I began to write about him. Academic writers claimed him as the recluse poet of alienation, isolation, and despair, while cultural critics assigned philosophical debts and resonances to Arthur Schopenhauer and Bishop George Berkeley, among others. Theatrical scholars and dramaturges settled for allegiances to Irish antecedents or alliances to the continental theater of the absurd. There was truth in them all, but none was the entire truth. I saw my task as to provide the biographical information that would allow all forms of critical writing to flourish in new and hitherto unknown or un-thought-of directions. I was beginning to see the genre of biography as the tool that was the entry into deeper and more detailed inquiries into aspects of a writer’s work.
However, when it came to methodology, I had none. I was intent on simply allowing the written life to unfold exactly as Beckett had lived—and was living—his own. I would not try to create a structure that would impose arbitrary boundaries on content, nor would I try to carve the life story into neat and tidy categories. Sitting in the quiet of my office, pondering the overwhelming task before me and trying to create a theory or thesis through random notes in the DD, I formulated what I called my “non-methodology,” one I have followed ever since. I wrote that every life is messy and varied, subject to the vagaries of external events and outrageous fortunes. A biography was a living, breathing entity that had to be free to meander down its own particular paths and byways, which was quite unlike everything I had been taught in my academic life, where peer-reviewed journals expected subjects to be presented within rigidly proscribed parameters.
I found myself telling all this to Leon Edel when we met accidentally in the National Gallery of Art. We were both in Washington for a biography conference, he as a distinguished speaker and I as a rapt novice in the audience. We sat for well over an hour as I explained my method, posed my questions, and asked for his advice. He seemed to relish the conversation and was generous with examples from his own experience. I still honor the tips he gave, and I follow many of his techniques to this day.
When it came to my own process, allowing the writing itself to unfold freely often required ruthless pruning later. This was most apparent in my beginnings, the first paragraphs, which fell somewhere between overblown and florid. In my journalism career I had strived for the pithy first sentence, the “catchy lede” that would draw the reader into the story, but I rarely got there on my first try. I remember how my favorite editor would stand over my shoulder when I was writing on a deadline, peering at my typewriter through his little granny glasses. “Get up,” he would say before he sat down in my chair, ripped out my story, and wrote his own simple and direct first sentence, which he would then paste over my gloriously inflated prose before sending everything off to the copy desk. You would think I had learned something about simplicity and directness in the several years I worked with him, but when I started to write Beckett’s life, I began with my usual grandiosity. It would seem I had learned nothing.
Even though I knew that the “three p’s,” the “passionate purple prose” I was writing, would probably never see the pages of a finished book, it did serve a purpose. I sometimes needed to write ten or fifteen pages about a minor critical essay of Beckett’s to be able to understand which several sentences, a paragraph at most, really expressed what was important. I had to leave the cutting-room floor awash in discarded pages before I knew what I needed to keep.
It took time to create my hybrid calendar-chronology that summer, but it was well worth it. This was a busy and productive period; I wrote steadily, watching the book take form in bits and pieces as I wrote those sections for which I had significant information and multiple sources to confirm it. I was still conducting interviews as I wrote, concentrating now on people in the theater who had worked on American productions of Beckett’s plays, so that when I returned to Ireland and England, I could compare their approaches to various continental ones. I spoke to several psychologists and psychiatrists who had written about Beckett, all of whom were convinced that he had serious mental problems. I listened carefully, collected everything they gave me, and put it into a file for careful consideration. Vivian Mercier sent me his correspondence with Beckett and a chapter of the book he was then writing; I was relieved to find that nothing in it impinged upon mine.
And then Mary Manning Howe arrived to spend the summer with her daughter, the poet Susan Howe, in Guilford. There were many lunches and dinners, lots of fun and happy conversation at my house and Susan’s, and even more when another of Mary’s daughters, the writer Fanny Howe, arrived with her children. Soon it would be October and time for me to leave for Paris. As was my custom, I wrote to Beckett to give him my dates in Paris. I was stunned to receive his reply, in which he told me he “deplored the trouble you have caused with Mrs. Howe and her daughter Susan,” ending with “I prefer not to see you.”
Now what?