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Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Me – a Memoir

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There was love, a very strong love, and obviously for my part there was also huge admiration for her. National Book Award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her fifteen remarkable years in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, painting intimate new portraits of two literary giants and revealing secrets of the biographical art. Simone viewed it as an assassination, that Zaza had been murdered by her milieu,” says Le Bon de Beauvoir.

When the interviews went well, the pair concluded with a Scotch that had been judiciously watered down by De Beauvoir’s companion and adopted daughter, Sylvie. People had laughed at the idea of her talking about clothes, but once she had opened the door of her studio flat in Montparnasse it was evident that she must have thought about them. She explains that by the time she had recovered from the misogyny of her Beckett years, she had developed not only a thick skin but a dawning feminist consciousness. Lots of people wrote to her, especially young women and especially philosophy students like me, and she always replied,” she says. Even now she feels the need to keep reminding us that “I was the only one who recognised” that the figures in Beckett’s plays are based on real “Dublin characters and the actual places” of his youth.Immediately after their talk was done, she ran back to her hotel room, and using the cards as aides-memoires, wrote down all she could remember of what had been said.

It is this dimension of the newly released diaries and letters that makes it especially interesting to reconsider her life and legacy. But Bair burned – still burns in fact – to demonstrate that the attention she paid to Beckett’s early life brought insights that no amount of textual close reading ever could.Finally I arrived at the school gate and climbed the front stairs, joyfully trundling my satchel overflowing with new books. Though Beckett and De Beauvoir lived almost on the same street, they loathed each other – an animus rooted in De Beauvoir having rejected one of Beckett’s early stories for the literary magazine she edited with Jean Paul Sartre, Les Temps Modernes. I suddenly understood, in a joyful stupor, that the empty feeling in my heart, the mournful quality of my days, had but one cause: Andrée’s absence. Whatever else it was, Beauvoir’s feminism was not triumphalist and her literary strategy was risky when she turned to writing her own story.

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