The blistering experience of writing about Samuel Beckett

For those of us with nagging doubts about the value of literary biography, books that show the biographer at work — a genre with a solid pedigree — exert a peculiar and not entirely healthy fascination. We traipse through the sausage factory feeling sick to our stomachs yet weirdly hankering for a bite of the finished product.

Some eminent biographers — Hermione Lee, for instance, in Body Parts (2008) — have exposed the tricks of the trade with clinical detachment, scarcely mentioning their own practice; others, such as Michael Holroyd in Works on Paper (2002), Richard Holmes in This Long Pursuit (2016) and the late James Atlas in The Shadow in the Garden (2017), mix in a generous measure of self-scrutiny. Deirdre Bair, the prize-winning American author of half a dozen biographies, sits at the extreme end of the spectrum. She refers to her Parisian Lives as a ‘bio-memoir’. An account of the 17 years she spent writing her first two biographies (Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir), it’s focused fixedly on her own personal experience.

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And what an experience. Bair launched into her life of Beckett in 1971 (two years after he was awarded the Nobel prize) when she was a newly minted PhD with no experience as a biographer. The flap copy of Parisian Lives insists that when she first approached the author of Waiting for Godot, Bair had yet even to read a biography — but that hyperbolic claim is exploded on page 17 when we learn that, as an undergraduate, she had ‘discovered and admired Suetonius, Plutarch and Vasari’ and ‘chuckled over’ the Notker and Einhard biographies of Charlemagne.

All the same, half a century ago she was a 36-year-old mother of two with a doctorate from Columbia University and before that a journalist — and still she had the audacity and persistence to secure an interview in Paris with the Nobel laureate.