As far as I know there are only two published authors from the former coal mining and steel manufacturing town of Monongahela, PA, Terrance Gelenter, whose modest output has been dwarfed by the collossally talented, prolific biographer, and ardent francophile, Deirdre Bair. From the age of four she knew that she would become a writer.
As far as I know there are only two published authors from the former coal mining and steel manufacturing town of Monongahela,PA, Terrance Gelenter, whose modest output has been dwarfed by the collossally talented, prolific biographer, and ardent francophile, Deirdre Bair. From the age of four she knew that she would become a writer. Her father's 500 volume library, a gift from a local philanthropist, formed the foundation of a literary education.
A fourth generation Italian-American grandaughter of a steelworker and niece of the bartender at the Sons of Italy social club, where my non-Italian relatives would often gather for an Iron City (the local brew,) she was raised in a household that read Corriere della Sera and New York's Il Progresso. Her latest biography of Al Capone allowed her to tap into that genetic heritage.
But her earliest works were set in France and it was Suzanne Simms, her Monongahela High School French teacher who piqued her interest in the French language and French literature. Certainly not from the local French speakers of whom there were two:my mother and her friend Frenchy, who owned a local dress shop.
After completing her degree at Penn she was hired by NEWSWEEK to work in New York. Not long thereafter in 1957 fate intervened and her Navy officer husband was assigned to the 6th Fleet in Nice. When she attempted to resign, her boss had a better idea-be a stringer in France. For a journalist in France those were heady times: the Algerian War was ratcheting up and De Gaulle returned in 1958 to found the Fifth Republic.
In college she discovered Joyce, Irish literature and Beckett's fiction. Her 200 page Master's thesis was based on one chapter of Ulysses. It was as that point that she made the decision to become the writer that 4-year old girl had imagined herself to be. Now imbued with Beckett she wrote him a letter and amazingly he responded.
On the strength of that correspondence she earned a Graduate Fellowships for Women from the Danforth Foundation. It was intended to pay for women to get PhDs and take up positions in universities, where there were so few of them in the 1970s. She used it to visit Beckett in Paris. The result was her first book, Samuel Beckett.
In the midst of the rise of her feminist hackles, Bair, a specatator in the audience as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan took center stage, began her biography of the feminist icon Simone De Beauvoir.She had unprecedented access and over the course of numerous personal interviews was able to develop an in-depth narrative that offers an insider's view of the most impersonal of personal narrators. De Beauvoir's love affair with Nelson Algren was mother lode of material for the book and at one point Baird noticed De Beauvoir's large silver ring: "A wedding gift from Nelson."
On the road to Al Capone she wrote Anais Nin, Saul Steinberg, Jung and Calling it Quits-Late-Life Divorce and Starting Over.
Capone was proud to be a first generation American and proudly boasted: "I'm not Italian, I'm Brooklyn."
Circumstances denied him an extended education but he was a cultured man with a passion for opera, especially Verdi and while serving time in Alcatraz he worked in the prison library.
A devoted family man, loving his children and, in love, with his pretty, blue-eyed, blonde Irish bride Mary Josephine (Mae) Coughlin, his legendary whoring notwithstanding. Let's just say that they were there. His grandchildren are still at a loss to explain "how the same person could be so admirable and still be guilty of the terrible things he did."
Bair has once again combined meticulous research with a narrative flair to reveal another layer of the man whose name still evokes images of booze, jazz and Tommy guns.
