NYT Remembers Deirdre Bair (1935–2020)
The biographer who told Beckett and de Beauvoir's life stories passed away on Friday at the age of 84 in New Haven, CT due to heart failure. She was, in Neil Genzlinger's words, "an unknown writer [who] a half-century ago scored a coup by getting the reclusive Samuel Beckett to agree to let her write his biography, then secured the same permission from another towering literary figure, Simone de Beauvoir." More:
Ms. Bair called herself “an accidental biographer, one who had never read a biography before she decided that Samuel Beckett needed one and she was the person to write it.”
She came to that decision serendipitously. Having received a fellowship to do graduate study at Columbia University, she needed a research subject. After making too-slow progress on a medieval-studies topic, she decided to turn to a 20th-century author instead. She wrote the names of some possibilities on index cards.
“Without thinking about which name might present the best opportunity for original research,” she said years later, “or even which I liked the most, I shuffled them into alphabetical order. There were no A’s, and Beckett came first, before Joseph Conrad and E.M. Forster. Beckett it shall be, I said to myself, and that was how my life in biography began.”
She dived into a study of his novels (“Molloy,” “Malone Dies”) and plays (“Waiting for Godot,” “Happy Days”). “Reading Beckett’s work made me want answers to a lot of questions,” she said, “all of which were based on the life from which the work sprang.”
Deciding to attempt a biography, she wrote to Beckett in Paris from her home in Connecticut in July 1971.
“The mail between New Haven and Paris was probably never again as swift as it was during that exchange,” she said. “A week to the day after I mailed my letter, I received his reply.”
To her shock, Beckett was amenable. “Any biographical information I possess is at your disposal,” he wrote.
“If you come to Paris,” he added, “I will see you.”
Learn more at the New York Times.