Deirdre Bair (1935–2020)

This is an excellent biography of a remarkable person. One might have questioned the need for a biography for one who was, in Bair’s words, so “publicly introspective,” given her four-volume memoir and her transparently autobiographical novels. Yet Bair demonstrates time and again how valuable it was to have personal access to Beauvoir in the last years of her life, as well as to her relatives and many of the “Sartristes.” I found this particularly so whenever she questioned show more Beauvoir about the frequently-uttered criticism that, apart from her refusal to bear children or do housework, her subservience to the needs of the man she’d bound herself to was that of a traditional “helpmate,” despite her scorn of the institution of marriage. It also speaks for Beauvoir that she permitted this examination, even if she sometimes refused to say more than evasive answers such as “one must have been there at the time.” In the end, I felt that while she did organize her life around the needs of Sartre, she was his intellectual equal, a valuable sparring partner in his work.

In addition to being an intellectual giant, Sartre was what one person in the book called a Peter Pan—a boy who didn’t want to grow up; less charitably, he could be called an egotistical monster (a reminder that great philosophy isn’t always produced by admirable people). Catering to him must not have been easy.

While Bair enables readers to form their own opinion of these two central figures, when it came to her depiction of the role of two persons whose closeness to Sartre toward the end of his life destabilized his relationship with Beauvoir and marginalized her, I found myself disliking them as much as Beauvoir did.

To recount Beauvoir’s life, given the volume of her and Satre’s written output, their frequent travels, and the comings and goings of associates, disciples, and lovers (including the great romantic love of her life, Nelson Algren) presented an organizational challenge. I think Bair mastered it for the most part, but not completely. At times, I didn’t feel that, as a reader, I needed to be told something for the second or third time.

These are quibbles. In the introduction, Bair reflects on why writing biography was one of her “preferred forms of critical inquiry . . . : How did X’s life and work illuminate our cultural and intellectual history; how did X influence the way we think about ourselves and interpret our society; and finally, what can we learn from X’s life and work that will be of use to us once we have read his/her biography?“ Measured by this self-imposed standard, I’d say Bair succeeded. show less

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 show more 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'. show less

When journalist turned biographer Deirdre Bair decided to expand on her doctoral thesis to write a biography of Samuel Beckett she surprised herself by garnering his agreement. Beckett said he “would neither help nor hinder” her efforts to write “this business of my life,” as he referred to the biography. Although he agreed to be interviewed repeatedly Beckett wouldn’t allow her to take notes or record their conversations. The book won a National Book Award in 1981 and took seven show more years to research, write and publish. It also took a toll on her personal and professional life, eliciting jealousy and hostility from “Becketteers” and others who felt she wasn’t the right person for the job.

Bair also wrote a biography of Simone de Beauvoir, a ten year effort. She got to know Beauvoir’s friends, family and many other feminists in that decade. Her descriptions of the interview, writing and travel process for both books, as well as how it all affected the other areas of her life as a professor, wife and mother, are fascinating. Bair provides true insight to the life and methods of a biographer.

Bair writes of the difficulties of being taken seriously as a woman, journalist and biographer, both in academia and the literary world. She feels it was an “almost unbelievable privilege to know and write about these two giants of contemporary culture.” She describes the experience well in this book. show less

An absolute joy. Bair recounts her experience of writing definitive biographies of Beckett and de Beauvoir. We learn a great deal about the subjects, intellectual Paris in the later 20th, the process of writing a scholarly biography, and Bair herself. Along the way, we also see what life was like for early second-wave feminists. Bair does not sugarcoat the exhausting experience of "having it all" and shares the very real barriers men (and some women) erected to keep women from succeeding. show more Highly recommended. show less