During the two weeks Beauvoir was away, I conducted interviews every day. As I met her relatives, friends, and acquaintances, I noted a clear distinction between her French friends and Beckett’s French friends. To start, hers did not like to hold meetings in the mornings, and the idea of an early-morning breakfast meeting, popular in America, was horrifying. Some of her writer friends who had spent time in the United States actually shuddered at the suggestion, reliving how they had been subjected to such meetings in New York or Los Angeles. Occasionally someone would meet me for morning coffee, but never before eleven. That suited me just fine, as it gave me time to prepare my questions for that day’s work.
I found another difference with Beckett’s friends, who tended to speak good English because they had participated in the wider cultural world. Many had lived, worked, or studied in England or the United States, and they brought a broader perspective to France’s place—and by extension theirs—in the intellectual and cultural firmament. Despite Beauvoir’s extensive travels and her work analyzing other cultures, her circle at home in Paris was curiously restricted. Her milieu was the philosophy, politics, and literature of her native country, and the people with whom she associated most closely reflected that. Few spoke any language but their own, and if they traveled, it was mostly for holidays and vacations to places where others just like them congregated. Few saw much need to move away from Paris even for their work; professors who held positions in universities far from the city commuted to their jobs and kept their primary residence in the capital. Everyone I spoke to was highly sophisticated, but compared to the French people I had met working on the Beckett biography, this group was relatively less diverse in their outlooks and ways of thinking. This was their conscious choice, to be sure, a simple preference to concentrate their interests and endeavors on their society of origin. By spending time with them, I gained insights into French history and culture that helped me to understand why Simone de Beauvoir had made so many of the controversial decisions her non-French readers questioned.
I thought that understanding Beauvoir’s relationships with men was a good place to start my interviews, and with Sartre and Algren both dead, Claude Lanzmann, renowned as the creator of the film Shoah, was one of the first men I contacted. He was a journalist and her junior by seventeen years when they met after he wrote an article about Sartre, and they were together as lovers from 1952 to 1959. They remained devoted friends until the end of her life.
Unlike most of her other close friends, Lanzmann said he preferred to come to my apartment rather than meet in a restaurant or hotel lobby, and on a Saturday morning, when he would be free for the day and could talk at length. I agreed, even though I was not happy to have even my most understanding friends come into that dark and dreary place at the bottom of an air shaft. And on that freezing day when it was sleeting, the heat was so minimal that I worried I would have to greet Lanzmann in my coat and hat. When he all but burst in, though, I soon forgot about the cold. He was a large man and a formidable presence, flushed with the success of Shoah, and he quickly got down to his own agenda.
He illustrated another difference between Beckett’s French friends and what I called in the DD Beauvoir’s “French” French friends. The Beckett interviews usually began with an exchange of pleasantries before I eased into my questions, beginning with general ones, such as when did you first meet, what was he like in the early days of your friendship—always something that would lead to pleasant memories and positive responses. Conversation would flow rather leisurely, during which time I would be on the alert for nuggets of new information so that I could casually shift toward a topic for which I wanted more detail, more depth. I was seldom able to do this with Beauvoir’s “French” French.
With Lanzmann I tried to begin the conversation by asking about the weather—a safe topic in any country or culture, I thought—and offering coffee to warm him. He brushed off my attempt at small talk by saying he had come on the Métro and was well caffeinated, and before he even removed his coat, he launched into a discussion of the woman he had known for so many years, first as her lover and now as a devoted and protective friend. Over the next several hours, he talked and I listened. He knew what he wanted to tell me, so I let him hold forth, because everything he said was both relevant and important. Occasionally I broke in to ask a question that related to his topic; sometimes he stopped to answer it directly, but mostly he kept on with what he was saying until he came to a natural conclusion. Only then would he answer my question. He was always this way whenever I saw him throughout the rest of Beauvoir’s life, and even after her death, when I consulted him to fact-check the manuscript. He was abrasive, seemingly irritated by my probing (and often repeated) questions. He was a difficult and opinionated man, but also extremely insightful and honest. I could argue with and dispute some of his views, but his ultimate defenses of them usually checked out, so I trusted him.
Lanzmann’s agenda illustrated another difference between the Beckett and Beauvoir biographies. In the Beckett world, there were not that many people with whom I needed follow-up appointments. With the exception of those who were closest to him, one interview was usually enough to help me ascertain the role an individual had played in his life. In the Beauvoir world, almost every single person I spoke to, no matter how close or how peripheral, required multiple meetings. Each had a specific agenda, which perhaps in proper French intellectual terms I should call a theory or a thesis, and only when they were satisfied that they had expressed it would they allow me to proceed with my questions.
To give some other examples, in my first meeting with Olga and Jacques-Laurent Bost, they wanted to talk only about Beauvoir’s life since Sartre’s death. But they had been her close friends throughout her entire adult life, so there was much more I needed to learn from them. I had the feeling that seeing them together was inhibiting what each wanted to tell me, and I was right. It worked out naturally to see them separately when Olga came down with the flu and Bost asked me to meet him in the bar at the Pont Royal. Sitting where he had sat with Sartre and Beauvoir for so many nights was a great tongue-loosener, as he recalled story after story, person after person. Those sessions with Bost alone, usually over many drinks in the early evenings, were immensely rewarding. Olga, perhaps because of her personal past as Sartre’s lover and the subject of one of Beauvoir’s novels, was far more guarded. I always saw her in their apartment, and after the third meeting I realized that I was upsetting her too much by asking her to relive her intimate relationship with Sartre as well as with Beauvoir. I ended my one-on-one encounters and saw her only one other time, in her husband’s company and over a hasty drink.
Pouillon and Pontalis had both read the French translation of my biography of Beckett and written critiques of it, as well as separate articles detailing their respective interpretations of his psychology. They would not talk about Beauvoir until I let them talk first about Beckett, and when they talked about her, they did so in terms of how her life and work differed from his. So many of Beauvoir’s friends had read the Beckett biography, and I think many assumed that I would write about Beauvoir through a comparison of her life and work with his. Those who held that view would not discuss Beauvoir until they had exhausted their list of differences between the two writers, from their writing styles to their personalities. Each was determined to see my second book as a continuation of what they deemed the “thesis” of my first, a thesis to which they did not hesitate to offer their “corrections.” I could only listen with a polite smile until the first opportunity to break in and get them back on track to talk about Simone de Beauvoir.
Because I was so well aware of the animosity between Beckett and Beauvoir, I was scrupulous about never mentioning one to the other in conversations with her or in correspondence with him. I let them be the ones to bring up each other’s name or to ask questions (usually about something connected to my work with them), and I trod carefully when I answered. I found it curious that after so many years, the animosity he held against her and the indifference she showed toward his resentment had never changed.
I was lucky that winter because all the primary players in Simone de Beauvoir’s life were in Paris and available for interviews. At the top of the list were her sister, Hélène, and Sylvie, now her officially adopted daughter.
I think Sylvie was leery of me before we met, and she remained cautious and distanced for the remainder of my time working with Beauvoir. Early in January, after our second meeting, Beauvoir and I were having our post-interview verre of watered-down scotch when we heard someone inserting a key into the apartment door. Beauvoir’s face brightened; she blushed, sat up straight, and leaned forward eagerly. “That will be Sylvie,” she said. “She wants to meet you.” She sprang this on me as a total surprise.
A slim dark-haired woman of medium height looking to be in her fifties came in and crossed over immediately to Beauvoir without glancing at me. They exchanged multiple kisses in greeting and a few words about the bad weather and heavy traffic before Beauvoir turned to introduce “Darrred” to her friend Sylvie. At such first-name familiarity, I thought I saw a dark shadow cross Sylvie’s face, so I, who had risen as a sign of respect, held out my hand and called her “Madame.”
She eyed me intently but said nothing in reply and addressed her conversation entirely to Beauvoir. I sat quietly smiling but not attempting to join in. Soon after, Sylvie included me by explaining that she had stopped in only briefly to see what Beauvoir wanted for dinner and now she was on her way to shop for it. As she was leaving, I told her I was very pleased to meet her and asked if she would be willing to grant me a separate interview. She seemed surprised and was clearly flustered until Beauvoir jumped in to say, “Of course Sylvie will see you. We will set a date tonight when we have dinner.”
Several days later I went to Sylvie’s apartment on the avenue du Maine. Again she was guarded, wary, and, I felt certain, seeing me only under duress. Beauvoir had cautioned me to “be gentle” with Sylvie and to let her know as much as I could about the book I intended to write. I had the feeling that she wanted me to reassure Sylvie that I had no desire to replace her in Beauvoir’s affections and no intention of trying to do so, so that was what I set out to do. I spent the first part of our meeting telling her about myself, about my husband and college-age children, my career as a professor. That struck a collegial chord, as she, too, was a teacher. We commiserated about the indifferent attitudes our students had toward learning, and that provided a good segue into some of the topics I hoped to address in the biography, particularly Beauvoir’s years as a lycée teacher.
The next several hours passed smoothly—but neither of us let down her guard. I did not want to ask any question that she might consider controversial or negative, because I felt that she did not fully trust me. In fact, throughout our subsequent meetings I always had the feeling that she simply did not like me. I did not dwell on this, nor did I try to change her attitude, because I was not looking for a new best friend or any sort of personal connection. All I wanted was a successful project, a book that would do us both proud.
I was reveling in the work for the new book, but the old one continued to intrude. Aside from the constant questions about Beckett from Beauvoir’s friends, I received requests from journalists who heard I was in Paris to interview me about him or to appear on radio shows to talk about him. I declined most of these offers, as the publications involved would be of little benefit to sales of the French translation, and trying to schedule appearances on these very-early-morning programs or after-midnight talk shows was impossible. I did speak on the phone with quite a few of the friends I had made in the Beckett world, but I managed to persuade most of them that I had so little time and so much to do for the new book that I could not see them. In retrospect, I think I did this because I was so fearful of contamination. This was a new and completely separate project, and I needed to make a clean break.
As for Beckett himself, I paid him my usual courtesy of letting him know that I was in Paris and gave him the address and phone number of my apartment. He sent one of his usual replies midway through my stay, one of his calling cards inserted into a letter-sized envelope. He wrote that he was overburdened with translations of several of his new plays and planned to stay in Ussy as long as possible to complete the work. Once again he was my phantom, never in my presence but always flitting in my background. It was always unsettling to find out how much he knew about my doings, as this time he knew that I was going to Kassel at the conclusion of my time in Paris to speak at a Beckett symposium—for which he wished me luck.
I was not looking forward to it, but I had accepted the invitation from the German university because I persuaded myself that I had to stand tall in the face of opprobrium and should therefore accept all such invitations. Just after the Beckett book was published, I read a remark made by the sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who told an interviewer that “a woman has no place as an artist until she proves over and over that she won’t be eliminated.” It became one of the mantras with which I fortified myself for possible combat.
Besides, I could put the conference in Kassel mostly out of mind because on my way I was going to stop at a tiny Alsatian commune called Goxwiller, where I would meet Hélène de Beauvoir. And that I could hardly wait to do.