CANR
WORK TITLE: PARISIAN LIVES
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.deirdrebair.com/
CITY: New York
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME: CANR 261
Lives in New York & Connecticut; http://mspub.blogs.pace.edu/2012/12/19/prof-denning-interviews-bestselling-biographer-deirdre-bair/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born June 21, 1935, in Pittsburgh, PA; married Lavon H. Bair (a museum administrator), May 29, 1957; children: Von Scott, Katherine Tracy.
EDUCATION:University of Pennsylvania, B.A., 1957; Columbia University, M.A., 1968, Ph.D., 1972.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Freelance journalist, 1957-69; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, assistant professor of English, beginning 1976; New York University Institute for the Humanities, New York, NY, former professor of contemporary literature and culture; lecturer and writer.
AWARDS:National Book Awards for biography, 1981, for Samuel Beckett: A Biography; National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, Gradavia Award, for Jung: A Biography, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, C.G. Jung Foundation, Australian University, Griffith University, and New York University Institute for the Humanities.
POLITICS: Liberal. RELIGION: Roman Catholic.WRITINGS
Contributor of journalism and scholarly articles to various publications.
SIDELIGHTS
Biographer Deirdre Bair’s study of Samuel Beckett is remarkable in that the Irish author had never before permitted a biographer’s inspection. Consequently, his promise to neither help nor hinder her efforts was all the encouragement Bair needed to embark on her task. For six years she probed into Beckett’s life, corresponding with hundreds of his friends and acquaintances, to produce her award-winning Samuel Beckett: A Biography.
One of Bair’s intents, as written in her preface, is to offer a “factual foundation for all subsequent critical exegesis.” Whether or not she succeeded in establishing such a groundwork has been debated by critics. Some critics have claimed that the volume contains hearsay, while others have praised it for its factual trivia. Much of Bair’s focus on the mysterious Beckett surrounds his relationship with his mother, who was angered by her son’s literary commitment. She went as far as to fake illness to draw him from this task. Their relationship was forever volatile, and Beckett himself suffered from guilt, as well as physical ailments that included boils, cysts, and tremors. Bair’s work on the biography of Beckett earned her a National Book Award for biography.
Bair followed her volume on Beckett with Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. This volume offers insights into the life of the French feminist author of fiction and nonfiction—including The Second Sex—who lived openly with existentialist philosopher John Paul Sartre and edited his work. Their relationship lasted from 1929 until his death in 1980, a time during which Sartre took other lovers. Her other long-term relationship was with American novelist Nelson Algren, beginning in 1947, and Bair draws on the hundreds of letters written by her to him, in English. The letters reveal this relationship as the only love in de Beauvoir’s life that brought her both intellectual and sexual fulfillment.
Anaïs Nin: A Biography is an account of the life of the controversial writer. A Review of Contemporary Fiction contributor wrote of the book: “Bair’s steady documentation is the ideal counterpart to Nin’s life and work.” Much of what is known of Nin comes from her diaries, which Bair notes are not entirely truthful, and Nin herself kept her lies in a box in order to keep track of them. Nin was born in Paris and abandoned by her father, with whom she purportedly later had a sexual relationship. Bair describes Nin as a “major minor writer,” and told Salon.com interviewer Cynthia Joyce that the perfect sexual life Nin writes of in her diaries caused women to strike out in search of similar lives, often with unsatisfying results. Nin took many lovers, including the author Henry Miller, and boasted of having sex with four or five men in a day. Her erotic fiction brought her success, and she took her work seriously. Her husband, Hugo Guiler, a poet who turned banker in order to support Nin’s lifestyle, was generous to a fault, which nearly bankrupted him. Her much-younger second husband, Rupert Pole, survived Nin, and he and Nin’s family and friends afforded Bair access to her personal papers.
Jung: A Biography is Bair’s study of the psychoanalyst who studied with Sigmund Freud. Carl Jung distanced himself from Freud and his belief that at the heart of all neuroses and psychoses lies an incest complex. He drew on a variety of methods, including dreams, to analyze his patients, most of whom were wealthy and sexually frustrated women.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor concluded by saying that Bair’s examination of the elderly Jung, in “‘a vanishing world,’ trying to understand himself at last by writing his brilliant memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections, is riveting, inspiring, and unforgettable.” The reviewer called Jung a “triumph of scholarship [that remains] highly accessible.”
Bair departed from biography to produce the cultural study Calling It Quits: Late-Life Divorce and Starting Over, in 2007. In this volume, Bair explores the growing trend of divorce among long-wed couples, examining what leads to these relationships’ decline, how couples reach the decision, and how they proceed with their lives. Her account is drawn from nearly 400 interviews with husbands, wives, and children from diverse backgrounds.
“This engaging narrative is an excellent introduction to a neglected phenomenon,” concluded Mary Ann Hughes in a review for Library Journal. Vanessa Bush, writing in Booklist, called the book “a fascinating and occasionally heart-wrenching look at marriage and life expectations.” A Publishers Weekly critic noted that “those going through a late-life divorce will encounter personal stories, all-too- human ones, that they will identify with.”
Bair provides an account of one of the most celebrated cartoonists of the twentieth century with Saul Steinberg: A Biography, published in 2012. Bair focuses less on his time as a New Yorker, where he produced iconic cartoons for the New Yorker magazine and the famous poster “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” than on his time in his native country of Romania. Steinberg was born there in 1914 and faced intense discrimination as a Jew. Bair relates how his experience there influenced his development as an artist, and how, after studying in Milan, he tried to immigrate to New York but was turned away and rerouted to the Dominican Republic. A year later, he was finally admitted to the United States, only to have the U.S. Navy send him to China.
Deborah Solomon, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called the volume “gripping and revelatory.” Solomon offered the caveat that, “for all its inspired moments, the book is riddled with factual errors that are surprising in a work of this seriousness. … Nonetheless,” the critic continued, “there is much that is new in Bair’s book, and Steinberg emerges from her account as a paradigmatic 20th-century exile and traveler, crossing and recrossing fixed boundary lines in both his life and his work. In his heyday, art critics butted heads over whether his drawings should be considered cartooning, illustration or museum-worthy art. By now such attempts at classification seem beside the point.” “Bair reports on decades of travel, dinners and arguments with editors, but what’s missing from this biography is the art,” wrote David D’Arcy in his review for SF Gate Online. “The effect is that the information that Bair unearthed often reads like a book of lists. We miss that crucial journey between perception and understanding. You’ll learn a lot from Saul Steinberg … but it can’t be the only book on this artist that you’ll ever need.” Writing in Maclean’s, Sarah Murdoch explained that the Saul Steinberg Foundation, not the author, is responsible for this gap, as they only allowed her to use thirty-five of his images. Murdoch credits Bair with a “monumental study that illuminates this clever, sophisticated, difficult, intensely sociable but elusive New Yorker” and concludes that “Bair tells her subject’s story well.”
In her 2016 biography, Al Capone, His Life, Legacy, and Legend, Bair offers the first comprehensive biography of this iconic gangster to be created with the full cooperation of the family. Bair attempts to get behind the numerous mobster myths of the man, showing on the one hand his ruthlessness, as witnessed in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, in which he took out a rival gang, while also showing a more human side as a family man. At the height of his power, Capone ran a multimillion-dollar crime operation in Chicago, involving prostitution, gambling, and bootlegging. He became the poster boy of a gangster in America, and his fall was as precipitous as his rise, convicted on tax evasion and sent to Alcatraz. When he was released, he joined his Irish-American wife Mae and his family in Miami, a much less flamboyant individual, ultimately dying in 1947 of syphilis. Bair’s biography includes archival documents from Capone’s family as well as personal testimony, and also looks at how the legacy of Capone still affects his descendants.
A Bookpage reviewer felt that in Al Capone, Bair “carefully tries to sort out truth from baloney,” and is “particularly good at putting the Capones in the context of the Italian immigrant culture that shaped them.” The reviewer added: “Capone himself wouldn’t have liked that; he always stressed that he was American-born, not an Italian. But he would have gotten a huge kick out of his enduring fame.” Library Journal contributor Karen Sandlin Silverman also had praise, commenting, “Bair has written perhaps the last word on Capone.” A Publishers Weekly writer thought that this biography is “best suited for those who are already somewhat familiar with Capone, bootlegging, and the Chicago Outfit.” Higher praise came from Glenn C. Altschuler writing in SF Gate Online: “These days, Americans who view dead gangsters and bullet-ridden cars as ‘entertainment,’ divorced from reality, may identify with a man who thumbed his nose at social conventions, disobeyed the law and got away with it, for a time. And, Bair concludes, Capone illustrates venerable American traditions: a tendency to conflate fame with notoriety and, when a legend outruns a man and the facts, to ‘print the legend.'”
Bair’s 2019 work, Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir, provides an inside look at a biographer at work, as Bair reviews the various challenges in writing her first two biographies. “In a candid and engrossing memoir, Bair creates unvarnished portraits of those two headstrong, demanding, and brilliant individuals as well as of her growth as a researcher, writer, and feminist,” noted a Kirkus Reviews critic. Regarding the Beckett biography, Bair recalls that she had just finished her doctoral dissertation on the Irish playwright when she requested his help in writing a full biography. They met in Paris, and Beckett told Bair that he would neither help nor hinder her in this endeavor. Over the years of research for the biography, Bair spoke with a wide variety of relatives, friends, and enemies of Becket, and on publication, Bair gained her own share of enemies who were critical of her views. As a result, Bair actually suffered a breakdown and believed that she would never write another biography. However, when a colleague suggested in 1980 that Bair write a biography of Simone de Beauvoir, she decided this would be a perfect comeback for her, for she saw de Beauvoir as a woman who managed to make a success of all aspects of her life. This appealed to Bair, who by this time was balancing her writing with her work as a professor as well as with being a wife and a mother. Still, this biography offered further challenges, including de Beauvoir herself, who was reluctant to speak about personal issues, and the obstacle of having to deal with publishers and academia who were still less than welcoming to women.
Writing in the online Library Journal, Thérèse Purcell Nielsen observed of this memoir: “Bair settles some scores and remains moot on a few issues of interest in the literary world in a narrative that will hold the most appeal for Beckett and de Beauvoir aficionados.” The Kirkus Reviews critic termed Parisian Lives a “rare, welcome look at the art and craft of biography.” Similarly, a Publishers Weekly reviewer noted: “Bair’s exhaustively detailed and lively memoir also serves as a solid study in the art of biography.” Likewise, a contributor on Niklas’ Blog concluded: “First and foremost, this book is a tale of the ups and downs of writing about human beings, and what those human beings bring to the table while and how you write about this. This is a laudable and highly recommendable memorial of extraordinary times in the life of a very considerate and apparently skilled biographer.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Bair, Deirdre, Samuel Beckett: A Biography, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (New York, NY), 1978, reprinted, Summit Books (New York, NY), 1990.
PERIODICALS
Artforum International, January, 2013, Sarah Boxer, review of Saul Steinberg: A Biography.
Atlantic, June, 1990, Susan Rubin Suleiman, review of Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography, p. 113.
Belles Lettres, January, 1996, Boyd Zenner, review of Anaïs Nin: A Biography, p. 4.
Booklist, March 1, 1995, Donna Seaman, review of Anaïs Nin, p. 1174; October 15, 2003, Bryce Christensen, review of Jung: A Biography, p. 360; January 1, 2007, Vanessa Bush, review of Calling It Quits: Late-Life Divorce and Starting Over, p. 28; November 1, 2012, Donna Seaman, review of Saul Steinberg, p. 18; August 1, 2016, Mark Levine, review of Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend, p. 5.
BookPage, November, 2016, Anne Bartlett, review of Al Capone, p. 41.
Bookwatch, July, 2006, Alma Bond, review of Jung.
Contemporary Review, July, 2004, review of Jung, p. 61.
Family Advocate, summer, 2008, Bob Guyot, review of Calling It Quits, p. 35.
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2003, review of Jung, p. 1205; October 1, 2012, review of Saul Steinberg; September 15, 2019, review of Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone De Beauvoir, And Me: a Memoir.
Library Journal, October 15, 2003, E. James Lieberman, review of Jung, p. 84; December 1, 2006, Mary Ann Hughes, review of Calling It Quits, p. 144; October 1, 2012, Marianne Laino Sade, review of Saul Steinberg, p. 76; September 15, 2016, Karen Sandlin Silverman, review of Al Capone, p. 102.
Maclean’s, January 29, 2007, Anne Kingston, interview with Bair, p. 14; December 24, 2012, Sarah Murdoch, review of Saul Steinberg, p. 80.
New Criterion, November, 2003, Anthony Daniels, review of Jung, p. 23.
New Republic, June 11, 1990, Anne Hollander, review of Simone de Beauvoir, p. 27.
New Statesman & Society, June 23, 1995, Victoria Radin, review of Anaïs Nin, p. 43.
Newsweek, March 20, 1995, Laura Shapiro, review of Anaïs Nin, p. 65.
New York Times Book Review, November 25, 2012, Deborah Solomon, “Drawing the Line, and Crossing It,” p. 18.
Publishers Weekly, April 13, 1990, Wendy Smith, “PW Interviews Deirdre Bair: This Biographer Finds It an Advantage to Write about People While They’re Still Alive,” p. 47; February 6, 1995, review of Anaïs Nin, p. 71; September 15, 2003, review of Jung, p. 52; November 27, 2006, review of Calling It Quits, p. 43; August 27, 2012, review of Saul Steinberg, p. 63; June 20, 2016, review of Al Capone, p. 143; July 22, 2019, review of Parisian Lives, p. 195.
Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1995, review of Anaïs Nin, p. 249.
Weekly Standard, March 11, 2013, Joseph Epstein, review of Saul Steinberg.
Women’s Review of Books, July, 1995, Nancy Mairs, review of Anaïs Nin, p. 21.
World Literature Today, autumn, 1995, Bettina L. Knapp, review of Anaïs Nin, p. 803.
ONLINE
Curtis Brown, https://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/ (October 18, 2019), “Deirdre Bair.”
Deirdre Bair, http://www.deirdrebairauthor.com (October 18, 2019).
New York University, Institute for the Humanities, http://www.nyu.edu/ (September 22, 2006), biography.
Library Journal, https://www.libraryjournal.com/ (October 1, 2019), Thérèse Purcell Nielsen, review of Parisian Lives.
Niklas’ blog, https://niklasblog.com/ (July 6, 2019), review of Parisian Lives.
Salon.com, http:// www.salon.com/ (September 22, 2006), Cynthia Joyce, “Dear Diary: Deirdre Bair on the Secret Life of Anaïs Nin,” interview.
SF Gate, http://www.sfgate.com/ (December 14, 2012), David D’Arcy, review of Saul Steinberg; (December 15, 2016), Glenn C. Altschuler, review of Al Capone.
DEIRDRE BAIR received the National Book Award for Samuel Beckett: A Biography. Her biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Carl Jung were finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Simone de Beauvoir biography was chosen by The New York Times as a Best Book of the Year. Her biographies of Anaïs Nin and Saul Steinberg were both New York Times Notable Books. Her most recent book is Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend.
ICM Partners
Deirdre Bair is the critically acclaimed author of five biographies and a cultural history of late-life divorce — Calling it Quits: Late Life Divorce and Starting Over. She received the National Book Award for Samuel Beckett and her biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and C. G. Jung were finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her biographies of de Beauvoir and Anais Nin were chosen by The New York Times as “Best Books of the Year” and her biography of Jung won the Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. Her most recent book was the biography of the artist/cartoonist Saul Steinberg.For her various publications, she has appeared on CBS’s The Early Show, NBC’s Today Show, PBS’s Fresh Air and Charlie Rose, and various programs on CBC Canada. Profiles of Bair and her subjects have appeared in publications throughout the United States, Canada, England, France, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. She has also lectured and taught at various writers’ conferences and universities in all these countries.Deirdre Bair has been awarded fellowships from (among others) the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. She is a literary journalist who writes frequently for magazines and newspapers about travel, feminist issues, and cultural life. A former professor of Comparative Literature, she writes and lectures internationally but divides her time mostly between New York and Connecticut.
Deirdre Bair
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Deirdre Bair (born June 21, 1935) is an American writer and biographer. She is the author of six works of nonfiction.
Bair received a National Book Award for Samuel Beckett: A Biography (1978).[1][a] Her biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and C. G. Jung [2] were finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize[when?]. Her biographies of Anaïs Nin and Simone de Beauvoir were chosen by The New York Times as “Best Books of the Year”[which?], and her biography of Jung won the Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis[when?]. Her book, Calling It Quits, examines late-life divorce and starting over and has been profiled on CBS’s The Early Show, NBC's The Today Show, the Brian Lehrer radio show and on CBC Canada. She published a biography of New Yorker cartoonist and artist Saul Steinberg in 2012 and a biography of Chicago mobster Al Capone in 2016, using never-revealed sources from his family.[3]
Bair has been awarded fellowships from (among others) the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (then named the Bunting Institute). She is also a literary journalist who writes frequently about travel, feminist issues, and cultural life. A former professor of comparative literature, she writes and lectures internationally. She divides her time mostly between New York and Connecticut. She is a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.
Contents
1
Bibliography
2
Notes
3
References
4
External links
Bibliography[edit]
Deirdre Bair (1990). Samuel Beckett: A Biography. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-69173-8.
Deirdre Bair (1996). Anais Nin. Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-0-7475-2542-4.
Deirdre Bair (1990). Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. Random House. ISBN 978-0-09-943347-7.
Deirdre Bair (2007). Calling it Quits: Late-life Divorce and Starting Over. Random House. ISBN 978-1-4000-6448-9.
Deirdre Bair (2008). Jung: A Biography. Paw Prints. ISBN 978-1-4352-9126-3.
Deirdre Bair (2012). Saul Steinberg: A Biography. Knopf Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-53498-7.
Deirdre Bair (2016). Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend. Knopf Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-53716-2.
About Deirdre Bair
Deirdre Bair received the National Book Award for Samuel Beckett: A Biography. Her biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Carl Jung were finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Simone de Beauvoir biography was chosen by The New York Times as a Best Book of the Year. Her biography of Anaïs Nin and her most recent book, Saul Steinberg: A Biography, were both New York Times Notable Books.
www.deirdrebairauthor.com
Bair, Deirdre PARISIAN LIVES Talese/Doubleday (Adult Nonfiction) $28.95 11, 12 ISBN: 978-0-385-54245-6
A biographer recalls the challenges of writing her first books.
Bair (Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend, 2016, etc.), who won a National Book Award for her first biography, of Samuel Beckett, and critical acclaim for her biography of Simone de Beauvoir, has been asked, time and again, "what were they really like?" In a candid and engrossing memoir, Bair creates unvarnished portraits of those two headstrong, demanding, and brilliant individuals as well as of her growth as a researcher, writer, and feminist. The author had just completed her doctoral dissertation on Beckett when she asked for his cooperation in writing his biography. He replied immediately, agreeing to meet her in Paris. "I will neither help nor hinder you," he told her. "My friends and family will assist you and my enemies will find you soon enough." During many years of research, she discovered the truth of his remark, as she interviewed scores of his friends, relatives, hangers-on, and vociferous enemies, all of whom she renders in lively detail. Although Beckett did not overtly interfere, he kept tabs on her research, often making her feel "like a marionette whose strings he was pulling." After her book was published, she found that she had made her own enemies among critics and scholars she calls Becketteers, who reviewed her book with "unrelenting hostility." Suffering "a minor breakdown," Bair thought the biography would be her last. When an admiring editor encouraged her to think of a new subject, however, de Beauvoir quickly came to mind. She was, Bair thought, "the only modern woman who had made a success of everything," an achievement that astonished Bair, who was juggling the responsibilities of a wife, mother, writer, and professor. She often considered the aging de Beauvoir to be "lumpy, dumpy, frumpy, and grumpy"; although agreeing to cooperate, she was reluctant to discuss sensitive issues, notably regarding sexuality. Besides offering privileged views of her celebrated subjects, Bair reveals herself struggling with structure and style and negotiating a world of publishing and academia not welcoming to women.
A rare, welcome look at the art and craft of biography.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bair, Deirdre: PARISIAN LIVES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A599964280/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bb577ea5. Accessed 5 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A599964280
* Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir
Deirdre Bair. Doubleday/Talese, $28.95 (368p) ISBN 978-0-385-54245-6
By turns scholarly and salacious, biographer Bair (Samuel Beckett) has loosened decades of polite tongue-biting to write the backstory in what she calls a "bio-memoir" of two influential writers. With humiliating candor, she admitted to a complete ignorance of how to write a biography when she approached Beckett in 1971 and obtained his promise to "neither help nor hinder you." Interviewing those in his social circle, Bair discovered that by "compartmentalizing people," Beckett pitted them against each other, each currying favor and reporting back to him on her research. She struggled to fund research and travel, balance her obligations as a wife and mother, and write. Upon publication in 1978, her Beckett biography was disparaged by several critics--some of whom accused her of trading sex for access; it eventually won a National Book Award. Bair refused offers to write another biography, until 1980, when a colleague suggested she write one of Simone de Beauvoir. Theirs was a more cordial relationship, marred only when Beauvoir grew cold and dropped "the Lucite curtain" to avoid uncomfortable topics. Beauvoir's death in 1986 propelled Bair into an extensive rewrite, delaying publication another four years. No matter her subject, Bair, a generous and graceful writer, has followed her dictum in writing biographies: "those of us who wrote literary biographies should ensure that our readers ended our books by wanting to turn immediately to our subjects' writing." Bair's exhaustively detailed and lively memoir also serves as a solid study in the art of biography. (Nov.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, 22 July 2019, p. 195. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A595252242/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=08d96620. Accessed 5 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A595252242
AL CAPONE
By Deirdre Bair
Nan A. Talese
$30, 416 pages
ISBN 9780385537155
eBook available
BIOGRAPHY
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the glory days of Al Capone--Scarface, Big Al, Public Enemy Number One--is how short they were: six years, from mid-level thug to big boss to jail. So why is he still the iconic American gangster, nearly 70 years after his death from the complications of syphilis?
Well, he loved publicity. But because his legend was a creation of newshounds and Hollywood, much of what we think we know is wrong. Biographer Deirdre Bair tries to uncover the man behind the flamboyant image in Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend. It seems a surprising project for an author who has written about Samuel Beckett and Carl Jung. Bair fell into it by happenstance when she met a man who was trying to find out if he was related to Capone. Eventually, she was able to talk extensively with Capone descendants.
They mostly turn out to be private, law-abiding folks whose reminiscences are engrossing and sometimes touching. Capone's Irish-American wife, Mae, is at the heart of their memories--a woman who was, in their eyes, decent, loyal and loving. Syphilis, likely contracted from a prostitute, destroyed Capone's mind, but Mae never gave up on him.
Bair carefully tries to sort out truth from baloney. No one knows how many people Capone and his minions killed. But Bair can say with confidence that the federal income tax evasion case that sent him to prison would have fallen apart if he hadn't had incompetent lawyers and a biased judge.
Bair is particularly good at putting the Capones in the context of the Italian immigrant culture that shaped them. Capone himself wouldn't have liked that; he always stressed that he was American-born, not an Italian. But he would have gotten a huge kick out of his enduring fame.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bartlett, Anne. "Al Capone." BookPage, Nov. 2016, p. 41. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A469503148/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=050a9ef2. Accessed 5 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469503148
* Bair, Deirdre. Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend. Nan A. Talese: Doubleday. Oct. 2016. 416p. photos. notes. index. ISBN 9780385537155. $30; ebk. ISBN 9780385537162. CRIME
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
National Book Award winner Bair (Samuel Beckett: A Biography) has written a definitive biography of "Public Enemy #1" Al Capone (1899-1947). Based on extensive research and interviews with as many Capone descendants as could be tracked down, the author attempts to tease out fact from legend. Interestingly, many times she concludes that the several versions of events published and passed down through the years all contain some portion of the truth. For example, one persistent myth attributes a quote to Capone about how he should have taken up the milk business, not the beer business, because milk is legal and always in demand. Bair couldn't verify this statement but documents in several places how Capone presented himself as a wholesome family man to the press, referring lovingly to his family. This book came about because Capone's relatives have recently started talking and writing memoirs. Capone is such a mythical figure that he was named one of the "100 Most Significant Americans of All Time" by the Smithsonian in 2014 and has been compared to both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign. VERDICT Bair has written perhaps the last word on Capone. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 4/3/16.]--Karen Sandlin Silverman, Scarborough H.S. Lib., ME
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Silverman, Karen Sandlin. "Bair, Deirdre. Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend." Library Journal, 15 Sept. 2016, p. 102+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A463632581/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1a58e4bc. Accessed 5 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463632581
Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend. By Deirdre Bair. Oct. 2016.416p. Doubleday/Nan A. Talase, $30 (97803855371551. 364. 1092.
Prolific and National Book Award-winning author Bair has written biographies before, but mostly of subjects in the literary or intellectual spheres (Samuel Beckett and Carl Jung, for example). Here she tackles a subject of a very different sort: Alphonse Capone, America's best-known gangster. Although she covers the particulars of Capone's very public and much-written-about career, her main contribution is in unearthing the man's private life (and trying to sort out the myths surrounding it). She deals, in detail, with Capone's womanizing and--not unrelatedly--the syphilis with which he was stricken. Bair has secured a great deal of cooperation from some of Capone's extended family, has performed copious research, and writes capably, but, finally, the focus on the personal life is problematic, as the most interesting part of Capone's story remains his already well-covered criminal enterprises. Still, this is a serviceable biography and will be of interest to both true-crime fans and anyone fascinated by the Prohibition era. --Mark Levine
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Levine, Mark. "Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 5. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A460761531/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=eab0b4da. Accessed 5 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460761531
Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend
Deirdre Bair. Doubleday/Talese, $30 (416p) ISBN 978-0-385-53715-5
National Book Award-winning biographer Bair (Samuel Beckett) interrogates the notion of the "real" Al Capone (1899-1947). Capone's life has been well documented in countless books, articles, and movies, but most of it has been falsified or exaggerated, especially given Capone's own marionette-like control of the media and his descendants' desire to bask in reflected glory. Bair's goal is to collect all the myths side by side, comparing their shortcomings and information gaps and debunking them as necessary. She follows Capone, in his fedora and lime green suit, from Brooklyn, Chicago, and Miami to a cushy jail cell in Pennsylvania prison, and then to progressively less cushy jail cells in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta and San Francisco's Alcatraz before his death in 1947 after neurosyphilis left him with the mental faculties of a seven-year-old. She also explores the lives of his friends and family, including the ongoing feud between his elegant, reserved wife, Mae, and his fiercely protective mother and sister, who considered themselves to be in charge of the household. The biography is a meticulously researched and thorough account of the man described by a reporter in 1931 as "gorgeously and typically American," but it's best suited for those who are already somewhat familiar with Capone, bootlegging, and the Chicago Outfit. Less informed readers will find themselves bogged down by too much detail and the sorting out of conflicting accounts. Agent: Kristine Dahl, ICM. (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend." Publishers Weekly, 20 June 2016, p. 143. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A456344766/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=18a28f62. Accessed 5 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A456344766
Review: Deirdre Bair – “Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir”
2019-06-07 09:44By NiklasIn Culture, People, Reading
Earlier this year, Michael Peppiatt’s The Existential Englishman: Paris Among the Artists was published; the book displays namedropping and some Parisian familières, and ended up as quite the end note of what can be written about celebrities, and Paris. It is the kind of book that most people will forget about when asked of their favourite autobiographies, six months after having read it.
Enter Deirdre Bair.
I did not know of her before reading this book; I’d not even read her biography on Wikipedia.
“So you are the one who is going to reveal me for the charlatan that I am.” It was the first thing Samuel Beckett ever said to me on that bitter cold day, November 17, 1971, as we sat in the minuscule lobby of the Hôtel du Danube on the rue Jacob.
The start of the book is catchy without trying to be too engaging. It’s clear that the writer is both experienced and knows rhythm; if writing a book is similar to pacing oneself for running a marathon well, this one holds up almost throughout.
Almost.
Somewhere between meeting Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, there is a lull. It is slight, and on the whole can be forgotten. This is my only complaint about the book, and mind you, I’m reviewing an uncorrected advance copy of the book.
Au contraire, Bair writes of her own family in a commendable way, never delving into the sappy or drab. Professing the same kind of verve, she describes her own problems with deciding to become a biographer without knowing how to become one. She even asked Beckett how to, in a roundabout way:
All this went through my mind in a matter of seconds as I dropped my head into my hands and said, “Oh dear. I don’t know if I’m cut out for this biography business.” His demeanor changed immediately, as did his tone of voice. “Well, then,” he replied, “why don’t we talk about it?”
Reading about Bair’s conquests with Beckett, it’s easy to want to read her book about him. What makes it even more interesting is how Beckett didn’t let her behind the scenes of his machinations:
Beckett was famous for never interpreting, analyzing, or explaining anything about his writings, particularly the plays. Although he would discuss modes of interpretation, MacGowran said, Beckett always fell back on the same final comment when questions got too close to the one he hated most: “What did you mean when you wrote X?” He brought such discussions to a quick end with “I would feel superior to my own work if I tried to explain it.”
It’s clear to the reader—without Bair trying to blow her own trumpet—that the author has jumped through quite a few hoops to have her Beckett biography published, by Jove. It’s even impressive that she contacted Richard Ellman, who’d had his own Beckett biography published before Bair did hers:
Richard Ellmann, then at Yale, told me he would never grant me an interview because if he had anything to say about Beckett, he would write it himself.
It’s easy to think back to those days when readers were everywhere, publishing houses possessed greater cultural power than they do today, and how authors were discussed by multitudes of people while they were writing novels. It’s also, sadly, easy to consider how Bair was subject to abject sexism, which led to rumours being spread, which, in turn, nearly led to her book not being published.
A cadre of Beckett specialists—the “Becketteers,” as I called them (all references to Mouseketeers are intentional), white men in secure academic positions of power and authority—formed my primary opposition. They were representative of a larger struggle in academia between the establishment and the perceived threat of women like me and my Danforth GFW colleagues, who were now competing for the same academic positions as the usual male candidates.
For the Becketteers in particular, I was a brazen example, the “mere girl” who had “invaded the sacrosanct turf of the Beckett world.” One or two younger members who were brave enough to speak to me privately asked if I was completely ignorant of the pecking order, while in public they shunned me so they could “keep on the good side of the powers that be.”
One of them surreptitiously motioned for me to join him as he sneaked behind a pillar in a hotel lobby at a Modern Language Association conference. “You are a pariah and I can’t be seen talking to you,” he said with a swagger, clearly feeling brave for engaging in this little clandestine conversation. His childish glee left me (unusually) speechless and unable to think up a quick riposte.
When I found my voice, I said I did not understand why I was being ostracized, since my two publications about Beckett had been received positively within the academic world. “Yes,” this man said, “in the academic world. But that’s not the Beckett world.”
Then, Simone de Beauvoir.
I love this part from Bair’s initial meeting with de Beauvoir:
I began to make stuttering conversation, starting with my thanks that she would give me time on her birthday. Her quizzical look as she replied let me know I was not making a very positive first impression. “Why not?” she said. “What is a birthday anyway but just another day?” I didn’t know what to say to that, but she didn’t pause long enough to let me answer as she asked, “Shall we get to work?”
I had assumed that this was to be a brief getting-acquainted session and I had not brought anything with me; I had no notebook or tape recorder, and I had not prepared any questions. My only preparation had been to practice how to tell her, in my best French, that I had to go home on the twelfth to teach during the spring semester and would not be able to begin serious interviews until at least the summer, and then only if my schedule allowed enough time for me to prepare myself with serious reading and research during the term.
I stammered something about how I did not wish to impose upon what I was sure would be a festive evening, so I had not brought any work materials with me. She snorted in derision. There was to be no celebration, she told me; her friend Sylvie would be coming later with something for dinner, but until then we should probably get started. I fished in my bag for something to write on and could find only my date book, so I pretended it was a notebook.
I got a reprieve of sorts from asking questions because she launched right in to tell me how we were going to work: “I will talk, and I will tell you what has been important in my life—all the things you need to know. You can write them down, but you must also bring a tape recorder, and I will have one, too. We can discuss what I tell you if you need me to explain it, and that will be the book you need to write. That will be the one you publish.”
I remember clearly how I lowered my head into my hands and said out loud, “Oh dear.” I had the sinking sensation that the book was dead and done before I even got started. “What is the matter?” she demanded. “What is wrong?” I was so flustered that I could not think in French and asked her if I could reply in English. She said of course, because she read and understood the language far better than she spoke it. “That is not how I worked with Samuel Beckett,” I told her, and then I proceeded to explain how he had given me the freedom to do my research, conduct my interviews, and to write the book that I thought needed to be written.
I told her how we had agreed that he would not read it before it was published, and I even told her how he had said he would neither help nor hinder me, which his family and friends interpreted as his agreement to cooperate fully. I told her that, having worked in such extraordinary circumstances, I didn’t see how I could work any other way. I hoped that she would be generous and gracious enough to give me whatever help I asked for, but that she would also allow me the independence to construct a full and objective account of her life and work.
The following paragraphs didn’t surprise me in the least, given that de Beauvoir’s one of the most notable existentialists:
And so we began. I thought I would ease into my questioning by asking about her earliest childhood memories, but she went first because she wanted to thank me. “Women come from all over the world to write about me, but all they want to write about is The Second Sex.”
Here she pounded one fist into the other open hand as she said, “I wrote so much else. I wrote philosophy, politics, fiction, autobiography . . .” She seemed to be pausing to catch her breath after every genre, and then she said, “You are the only one who wants to write about everything. Everyone else only wants to write about feminism.”
It threw me off-balance, but I did not have the luxury of reflecting on her generous appraisal until after I left, when I grasped the truth in it. During the 1970s and 1980s she had been slotted into the niche of feminist icon—all well and good, but she did not want to be there in perpetuity. Aware of her many different contributions to culture and society and extremely proud of them, she wanted posterity to acknowledge all her accomplishments.
I adore this quote from Beckett to Bair after she’d mentioned the “Becketteers”:
I talked so much that my wineglass was left mostly untouched, but it was getting late, so I started to gather my things.
Until then he had not said anything specific about the Becketteers’ behavior, but I think he was alluding to it when he volunteered one of the last things he ever said to me: “You must never explain. You must never complain.”
Indeed, there have been many times since then when I have been ready to lash out in retaliation for a bad review or an unkind comment, but every time I have remembered these words and I have never explained and never complained.
I also loved what Bair wrote about writing a biography and trying to stay level-headed in some way:
Joyce provided an example (one that he cribbed from Flaubert, but never mind) that I followed for everything I wrote: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” (I did keep myself refined out of existence, but I was never indifferent and didn’t bite my nails; I just picked at my cuticles.)
Pascal had the perfect pensée to help me open up and confide my own experiences to the permanence of print. When he thought about how his life was “swallowed up . . . in the eternity that precedes and will follow it,” he “[took] fright.”
When I began to write biography, I was, like Pascal, “stunned to find myself here rather than elsewhere . . . Who sent me here? By whose order and under what guiding destiny was this time, this place, assigned to me?” It led me to ask myself what had ever made me think that Samuel Beckett “needed” a biography and I was the one to write it?
Saint Augustine provided the answer for what drew me to Beauvoir: I had become “a question to myself. Not even I understand everything that I am.” And Rousseau gave me hope that sustained me during each biography, but especially within this bio-memoir: “My purpose is to display a portrait in every way true to nature, and the person I portray will be myself. Simply myself.”
If I managed to do that, then I have succeeded, and I am content.
In regards to this book, I hope Bair is more than content. She should be, I think. Then again, I was born just before her Beckett biography was published. This book contains many pointers to what a writer—biographer or not—should consider.
First and foremost, this book is a tale of the ups and downs of writing about human beings, and what those human beings bring to the table while and how you write about this. This is a laudable and highly recommendable memorial of extraordinary times in the life of a very considerate and apparently skilled biographer.
This book is scheduled for publication on 2019-11-12.
Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoirby Deirdre BairNan A. Talese: Doubleday. Nov. 2019. 368p. ISBN 9780385542456. $28.95; ebk. ISBN 9780385542463. MEMOIRCOPY ISBNNational Book Award–winning biographer Bair (Samuel Beckett: A Biography) turns her lens in a new direction with this “bio-memoir,” detailing her experiences during the 1970s and 1980s researching and writing about Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir. Bair’s transformation from a journalist and a harried, conflicted wife and mother to an academic chronicler of major 20th-century cultural figures takes place against a backdrop of burgeoning feminism. This dense account of her studies and nearly two decades of traveling to Paris to conduct research includes myriad examples of sexual discrimination and harassment almost inconceivable today. Relying primarily on the notes she kept in her daily diaries, Bair presents an exhaustive report of a seemingly endless list of literary notables she met and ate with and puzzled over, as she tracked down the inner and outer lives of Beckett and de Beauvoir (who, we are told, despised each other).VERDICT Bair settles some scores and remains moot on a few issues of interest in the literary world in a narrative that will hold the most appeal for Beckett and de Beauvoir aficionados.Reviewed by Thérèse Purcell Nielsen, Huntington P.L., NY , Oct 01, 2019
‘Al Capone: His Life, Legacy and Legend,’ by Deirdre Bair
By Glenn C. Altschuler Published 12:06 pm PST, Thursday, December 15, 2016
"Al Capone" Photo: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday
Photo: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday
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"Al Capone"
A few years after he took over the crime syndicate once run by Johnny Torrio, an observer of gangland Chicago called Al Capone “an unusual hood. He has concentration and executive ability beyond the ordinary. He is utterly fearless except when it is sensible to be afraid.”
For six years, 1926 to 1931, Capone was (in fact and in name) Public Enemy No 1. At the height of Prohibition, his “Outfit” raked in millions of dollars from bootlegging, gambling, prostitution and drugs — and waged a brutal war against rival gangs, getting away with scores of murders, including the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
Powerless to pin any crimes on Capone, the feds finally got “Scarface Al” (a moniker he hated) on tax evasion charges, sending him to Alcatraz, where he was reduced, physically and emotionally, to a shell of his former self, possibly by the ravages of neurosyphilis. Capone died at his home in Florida in 1947.
Almost seven decades later, Deirdre Bair reminds us, “the frenzy of publicity he inspired during his lifetime has increased exponentially and shows no signs of slowing down.” In 2014, Smithsonian magazine named him one of the 100 most influential individuals in American history.
In “Al Capone,” Bair (the biographer of Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, Carl Jung, Anaïs Nin and Saul Steinberg) acknowledges that the paucity of written sources and flaws in the content and interpretation of stories written about Capone during his lifetime make it difficult to add much to existing accounts of how this Brooklyn-born Neapolitan in his 20s displaced Torrio and ran the Outfit. The traditional methods of discerning the nature of a figure’s personal relationships, letters and diaries, “are mainly non-existent,” she adds.
Recognizing that “all we have are speculation and probability,” Bair has capitalized on interviews with Capone’s descendants. The result is an engaging biography that debunks many, many myths about Capone and captures him as a complex person, devoted to his parents, his wife, his siblings and his son; popular at times with the masses; clever and charismatic; and, at the same time, a monster whom authorities “held responsible for everything but the Chicago fire.”
Although she can be a tough-minded critic, Bair tends at times to accept as valid the testimony of Capone’s descendants (many of whom never met him), especially when it validates his essential humanity. She suggests that if Capone had wanted to run for mayor of Chicago, “he probably would be elected, and honestly at that — no ballot box stuffing would be needed.”
Although she knows that he was a serial philanderer and had several mistresses, Bair asserts that Al “took care never to dishonor” Mae, his wife, “while he was out and about.” Government prosecutors, she writes, “had so little insight into the man’s character. They knew that in his public life he was the personification of evil but when it came to families — and especially children — they ignored the evidence that he was the model of rectitude and loving paternal behavior.”
And when Capone was in jail, suffering from syphilis, and deemed by some to be “nutty as a fruitcake,” Bair indicates that Mae’s claims that her husband was just fine “ring true. ... Just being with her was enough to bring him back to reality.”
That said, Bair’s account does generate considerable sympathy for Capone. In the tax evasion trial, she reminds us, the judge broke with long-standing practice to reject a deal Al’s lawyers had made with prosecutors (whose case was “full of holes”) to plead guilty in return for a sentence of 2½ years in prison, sending him away instead for 11 years. While Al was in jail, he clearly received inadequate care for his syphilis. After his release, he had a mental age of 10 or 12 years old.
But Bair does not provide satisfactory answers to the most fundamental conundrum posed by Capone’s descendants: How could a person “be so admirable and still be guilty of the terrible things he did?”
Her speculations about his outsize afterlife, which includes books, films, websites, T-shirts featuring his mug, restaurants claiming he dined there, and comparisons with Donald Trump, however, should command our attention. Capone was embraced as “gorgeously and typically American,” the “perfect counterpoint to the political paradox that was Prohibition,” she writes, and then abandoned during the ’30s when people were out of work, hungry and homeless.
These days, Americans who view dead gangsters and bullet-ridden cars as “entertainment,” divorced from reality, may identify with a man who thumbed his nose at social conventions, disobeyed the law and got away with it, for a time. And, Bair concludes, Capone illustrates venerable American traditions: a tendency to conflate fame with notoriety and, when a legend outruns a man and the facts, to “print the legend.”
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. Email: books@sfchronicle.com
Al Capone
His Life, Legacy and Legend
By Deirdre Bair