Parisian Lives

3.5 stars, and stands on its own as a document of Bair's own writing life, apart from the two biographies that it orbits. Having not yet read Bair's books on Beckett or Simone de Beauvoir (SdB) this book is a peculiar starting place but it's where I began as it was at hand as I was self-quarantined in Paris due to a viral plague. Just a few thoughts to record here since none of the reviews I scanned captured these details. First, this is not a book about Paris or even the habitual Paris world of Beckett or SdB, full stop. There are other books on those topics.

This book primarily documents Bair's maturation as a professional writer through the then largely male dominated worlds of beat journalism, academic English departments and finally large corporate publishing concerns. The focus is largely on how she learned and invented her craft as a biographer and how Beckett and SdB and their separate communities both aided, hindered and even occasionally abetted her efforts. In Bair's telling there were a lot of bad actors that either wanted her to fail, perhaps because she was a naïve young American woman or more likely because they had similar writing goals and could see that this determined energetic person would lap them several times over with her prodigious work effort and focus.

Aside from the very few additional intimate details that she reveals about Beckett or SdB it was how Bair just bull-doggedly gets on with the work that was most interesting to me. These biographical projects are hugely complex efforts and each subject will bring or create unique problems that nevertheless need to be patiently accommodated. As example, In one instance, Beckett, who says in their first interview that he ‘will neither help nor hinder her work', further insists that nothing can be written or recorded during their sessions. Here Bair essentially re-invents spaced repetition with index cards in order to memorize the dates, times, points of clarification or contention so that she can keep the critical flotsam of a life's details floating within reach during a 2 hour time-boxed session with the subject. In Beckett's case a subject who also plainly caused Bair extreme amounts of anxiety just to sit with.

Surprisingly few hatchets are buried and if Bair's accounts are correct she showed great restraint in dealing with the arrogance, sexism and cultural bias that the various ‘Beckettarrians' and incompetent publishing agents tangled her up in at every turn. I'd shelf this book with Robert Caro's recent book, ‘Working'.