Deirdre Bair and the University of Pennsylvania

City Safari: The “PENNtrification” Of Deirdre Bair

The author of the just released ‘Parisian Lives, Samuel Beckett, Simone De Beauvoir and Me, was a Penn undergrad who later became a tenured Penn professor.

By Thom Nickels• Wed, Apr 01, 2020

When biographer Deirdre Bair was introduced at a speaker’s forum at the Central Branch of the Free Library, her last name was mispronounced twice, something that Bair says she’s used to because over the years so many people, even publishers, have gotten both the spelling and pronunciation of her last name wrong, with most calling her "Blair” or giving her a different first name like "Dee Dee.” 

Bair, the author of the just released ‘Parisian Lives, Samuel Beckett, Simone De Beauvoir and Me, was a Penn undergrad who later became a tenured Penn professor. She started out wanting to be a reporter and for a time worked for Newsweek. From Newsweek the trajectory of her life catapulted her into the world of biography. Her first biography on Al Capone paved the way for biographies of Saul Steinberg, Carl Jung, the diarist Anais Nin, Samuel Beckett and Simone De Beauvoir. 

‘Parisian Lives’ is the dramatic story of the many years Bair spent talking with and interviewing Beckett and De Beauvoir. Bair experienced considerable obstacles in writing these biographies. Although Samuel Beckett promised Bair his full cooperation—"My word is my bond. I will neither help nor hinder your work.”-- Bair found that among Beckett’s fans were groups of back biting people she termed ‘The Becketteers.” The ‘Becketteers,’ or friends of the playwright’s who were in competition for his love, stopped at nothing to make sure that Bair’s project took a nosedive. The situation got so bad that some Becketteers went out of their way to contact Bair claiming to be supportive of her work, offering information on Beckett when their real purpose was to trick Bair into saying something that they could then reconfigure so that the end result amounted to a lie, masquerading as truth. Some of these manufactured lies found their way to Beckett but fortunately Beckett had a sixth sense about such things, so the‘Becketteers’ never quite accomplished their goal of destroying Bair’s credibility. 

During the writing of the Simone De Beauvoir biography, Bair was the target of competitors who set out to tarnish her reputation or cause her embarrassment. The meanness and nastiness she experienced had its parallel in her experiences at Penn as a full professor, where fellow professors and administrators went public with the notion that a professor in the English Department (Bair) had no business writing about a French legend. 

"What makes you think you can write this book?” more than one of her colleagues asked. Sadly, every stereotype linked to the cutthroat competitive world of academia caught Bair in its snare. Bair’s retelling of what she experienced at Penn is disheartening. While I did not attend the author’s lecture at the Free Library, the author’s talk can easily be found on YouTube. Bair did not mention Penn during her Free Library talk but what she wrote about the university in Parisian Lives is devastating despite the fact that many good Penn higher ups offered her their unconditional support 

Some of Bair’s Penn digs:

1.Being in Paris and away from Penn had relieved me of that other thorn in my side—snide colleagues, tenure battles, etc.

2.Although Penn’s English Department recommended Bair for tenure, Bair writes: "My few allies among the full professors told me that the official letter recommending me put ‘scholar’ in quotes because my colleagues were not sure what to make of me.” Bair’s first application for tenure was rejected (that later changed) because two full professors wrote damaging letters to be placed in her file. "The full professor in the English Department, a man who enjoyed a reputation in the world of literature, had gone before the dean’s committee in person to argue that ‘she is not a scholar; she is only a biographer.’” 

3."I went through all the motions of getting through the days at Penn, letting all the continuing sarcasm, backbiting, and general bitchiness wash right over me.” 

 Bair has few good things to say about Philadelphia. "We moved to Philadelphia in September 1980, when my husband took a position at Penn’s University Museum. It was an unhappy move for me, having to give up my beloved house in Woodbridge, Connecticut, and my unhappiness was accompanied by back spasms that kept me confined to bed and on medical leave that semester…” 

It’s not at all likely that Bair’s alma mater will be inviting her to lecture on her books in the Irvine Auditorium. Like it or not, Bair just didn’t resonate with the city. Even the weather here gave her a headache. She writes about Philadelphia as being insufferable with humidity in summer and complains about the cramped living spaces she had to tolerate while living here. Her spirits only seemed to pick up when she escaped to Boston or Connecticut for long weekends away. 

Parisian Lives is quite honest in its exploration of Beckett’s sexuality (Bair states that Beckett was sometimes receptive to sexual advances from men). De Beauvoir’s sexuality also comes under Bair’s microscope. De Beauvoir denied being a lesbian and in fact found the word distasteful although as she would tell Bair, she never completed the sexual act with a woman because she never went "down there,” but stuck to cuddling, kissing and fondling above the waist. That was not lesbianism, she insisted. 

Bair was not afraid to ask De Beauvoir tough questions. Regarding the legendary French condemnation of lesbianism, Bair asked if she realized that she was speaking dismissively of lesbians because, despite her status as a feminist icon, she still retained "some of the prejudices of her conservative Catholic upbringing.” 

Bair recalls her first meeting with De Beauvoir: 

"I also noticed how she was dressed in what looked like a shabby red bathrobe over a nightdress. How strange, I thought, that she would be dressed this way on the evening of her birthday. This robe became familiar, as she wore it for many of our conversations during the next five years. She also wore a turban, which I unkindly came to call ‘the ubiquitous rag.’” 

Bair’s patience and meticulousness as a biographer is admirable. Parisian Lives is filled with the hardships and insults she had to endure while working on Beckett and De Beauvoir. Yet despite the many insults she had to endure, Bair was a master at holding her tongue, allowing the insults to whiz by her although hours after they occurred she records how she would fume with rage. 

In the end, her self-control paid off. In a devastating paragraph about English theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, she recalls how the pompous, full-of-himself man-diva demanded money from her for some information he had on Beckett. 

The Beauvoir-Sartre relationship also comes under scrutiny, especially De Beauvoir’s "campaign” to get young attractive girls to sleep with the old philosopher despite the fact that he was ill and did not smell good. The girls, under De Beauvoir’s direction, went obediently to Sartre’s bedside where they performed their duty. 

The video of Bair’s lecture at the Free Library shows a good-natured woman who smiles a lot. At first glance, Bair doesn’t look like the intellectual she is. She has the air of a whimsical popular writer along the lines of a Nora Ephron Eiphorn ("A Wallflower at the Orgy”). Behind the microphone, Bair doesn’t pick her teeth, sneer or throw her hair back in the assertive way that Susan Sontag used to do. She doesn’t interrupt or appear impatient at what some may consider ‘stupid audience questions.’ If anything, she appears to be too nice. But this mask is deceptive. They say that writers who write well are generally not the best of talkers. This is true of Bair although her talk at the Free Library was not deficient in the least. Her appearing too nice is what made so many people, from the Becketteers to Penn, dismiss her as a clay pigeon, an easy mark and as someone who really doesn’t count.