Buying drinks and rebuffing sexual advances ... the literary biographer reveals all about the process of writing two acclaimed lives
When Samuel Beckett agreed to let Deirdre Bair write his biography, everyone assumed it was because he was sleeping with her. The year was 1971 and there could be no other explanation as to why the reclusive Grand Old Man of Irish and European letters should bestow a pearl of such great price on a young American with no more than a recent PhD to her name. Evil-minded gossip flew around the obstreperous ragtag of ivy league professors, Irish poets, Parisian intellectuals and New York critics who had appointed themselves gate-keepers of the Beckett universe. If anyone was going to write about the author of Waiting for Godot, Molloy and Krapp’s Last Tape, they had always imagined it would be them. Now, it transpired, this American had pillow-talked her way into the literary gig of the century while they had been busy going to international Beckett conferences, getting drunk in Dublin pubs or fretting about why “Sam” hadn’t replied to their last three letters.
Yet as Bair reveals in what she calls her “bio-memoir”, the Nobel laureate never bothered to conceal his erotic indifference to the earnest, happily married woman who had cheekily suggested that she was the best person to write his life.
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