In the time between beginning work on her first book in 1945 and her so-called exile to Paris in 1952, Inga Beart wrote six novels and published two collections of poetry and eighteen short stories—a staggering amount of work, especially considering that she also found the time to marry and divorce two more husbands, get herself addicted to barbiturates, and become a bona fide celebrity, all in the space of about seven years.
That she wrote so much so quickly has always puzzled scholars, especially now that we know that nearly all her characters recreate in detail the lives of chance acquaintances. Even the few critics who still overlook her literary contributions and put her somewhere between hack journalist and outright plagiarist have to admit that it would have required hundreds of hours of interviews to grasp so fully the inner lives of the people that she met. But Inga Beart didn’t leave behind any research notes. There are no transcripts of interviews, and many of the real people who appear in her novels recalled only brief conversations; some of them wondered if she’d even been listening.
People who don’t know anything about her assume she must have been a kind of genius: She sat with a page and the words just flowed. But the few friends who saw her work said it wasn’t like that. None of it came easily. She’d hurl the pages across the room, the typewriter would crash to the floor. She’d slip on a pair of red high heels and go out, surround herself with exiled Russian intellectuals, Europeans with arcane titles of nobility, dissident Chinese, and enough pills and alcohol to allow her to forget the small sad lives of her characters.
Things changed in 1952, when an article in the New York Post exposed the undeniable parallels between the life of a young elevator operator and the title character in her most recent novel. The young man claimed he ought to be compensated for the use of his story, and though nothing came of it, Inga Beart’s publisher dropped her and she couldn’t seem to find another one; none of the big houses wanted the risk of a lawsuit. New exposés were coming out almost by the week, as former landladies, a Brooklyn chiropractor, even my mother’s own press agent stepped forward to claim this or that plotline as entirely their own, and Inga Beart found herself in disgrace, accused of exploiting her subjects and cheating her readers.
There was no such fuss in Europe, where Inga Beart’s books had sold well from the start, and I suppose Paris was a natural place for her to escape to. I wondered if the waiter might have been a little quicker with my beer if he knew that Marguerite Duras herself had personally extended an invitation to my mother. Inga Beart’s elegance, her inscrutable beauty and glittering lifestyle contrasted with the stubbled prairies and calloused hands that populate her novels in a way the French, I think, particularly appreciated. Like Sartre or Duras, she wrote about the half-shadows of modern existence, but she lived in the light.
So, like so many other American writers and artists, Inga Beart received a warm welcome when she arrived in Paris in the spring of 1952. An editorial in Les Temps modernes that month predicted that the intellectual ferment of the city would give Inga Beart a new lens through which to see her native land. Other commentators accepted her as the latest addition to a list that included Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the like, and set about anticipating a seminal work of open-sky Americana inspired by Paris’s narrow streets and dark cafés.
But Paris was the end rather than the beginning for Inga Beart, and as I found when I first began my research, only a few photographs from those years made it back to the United States. American magazines reported occasionally on her having been seen with one or another literary personality, but by then the articles had gone from the front pages to the back, where they were stuck in between the ads for nylon stockings and the House and Garden columns, often with titles like “Beart appears disoriented in Paris sighting” or “Reclusive American author refuses French literary honor,” and they do not come with pictures.
There is one photograph of Inga Beart in Paris that everyone knows: She is sitting at a little table with a TABAC sign behind her and a small forest of empty glasses in front of her. The picture is dated August 1, 1954—presumably it was the last photograph taken of her before the events of August 10. In it, the ash on her cigarette is nearly as long as the cigarette itself and she is wrapped in some kind of silk. At first glance she looks young, but with a closer look one can see that her skin seems to have taken a deep breath and is holding it just a moment more before the inevitable release. Her pale eyes are looking at something just beyond the camera, so that no matter where you put yourself in relation to that photograph, she will never look at you.
I’d been trying to catch the waiter’s eye for some time before I finally put on my hat, stepped inside to say “Thank you anyway” to the bartender, and continued on along the street. Up ahead was a grand-looking arch. I wondered for a moment if it was the Arc de Triomphe, though I knew that one came at the end of the Champs-élysées, which could hardly be the street I was on—I’d ended up in the kind of neighborhood with sex shops and young men selling DVDs from blankets spread across the sidewalk. A woman in very high heels and a low décolletage stood in a doorway, and it took me a moment to realize that she was there on business. A few doorways up the street was another lady and another. I paused for a moment to watch as a man in an overcoat approached one of them. He and the lady stepped into the shadows to confer, then the man walked away. The woman laughed and called him back. Her eyebrows were painted on at an almost comic angle, as if, though she clearly had been selling her charms for some years now, she was still surprised. The man returned, and in the shadow of the doorway I saw money change hands—I couldn’t see how much. The woman pointed to someplace up the street, and the man walked in that direction. The woman took out her compact and looked into it for a moment, then followed in the direction the man had gone.