84 Jackie 1930–1962
and the work wasn’t tiring. Jackie lived on the campus, in the
Graduate Center, in a modern building, but it was expensive
and strictly off -limits to girls. Even if we sometimes managed to
slip past the guards, it didn’t make life any easier for us. In com-
parison with his years at Normale Sup, Jackie had very little
money. His bursary wasn’t enough, so he gave lessons to some
of the professor’s children, three mornings a week. That year,
we met hardly anybody apart from Margaret Dinner, known as
Margot, a student at Radcliff e, the women’s college that was the
counterpart of the then exclusively masculine Harvard.^10Whenever they could, Marguerite and Jackie met up in the
extraordinary Widener Library, on the Harvard campus. It was
‘the hugest cemetery for books in the world’, ‘ten times richer’ than
France’s Bibliothèque Nationale, according to Derrida. And it was
especially alluring because he had been allowed to ferret around
in the reserve stock.^11 He continued to work on Husserl, while
systematically reading Joyce’s work; throughout his life, he would
consider Ulysses and Finnegans Wake to be the most grandiose
attempt ever to bring together in one oeuvre ‘the potential memory
of mankind’.^12 At that time, Derrida’s written English was already
excellent, but he felt uneasy about speaking it. Marguerite could
express herself more fl uently than he could, and with more confi -
dence: ever since childhood, she had been used to speaking another
language than her own.
Jackie also took advantage of his stay in Harvard to learn to use a
typewriter. Shortly after his arrival he bought himself an Olivetti 32.
‘I type very quickly, very badly, making lots of mistakes,’ he later
confessed. Used to the international keyboard, he would continue
for years to buy his typewriters from the United States.
‘We spend all our time going for walks, reading and working (just
a bit),’ he told Lucien Bianco.^13 In his letters to Michel Monory, he
was as ever more precise and more melancholy:
It’s a life devoid of events, dates, or any truly human society,
more or less. We live by ourselves. Outwardly, life runs at
the speed of the most provincial university town. We go ‘into
town’, i.e. Boston, ten minutes’ journey by subway, only once
or twice a month. Apart from that, we’re working, or trying
to. Marguerite is translating a dreadful Soviet novel and I’m
typing. I’m reading, trying to work, to settle down to some-
thing. But all I do is the complete opposite and wonder how it’s
possible to work without constraint.^14At Christmas, they returned to New York. In spite of the cold,
they were enthralled, and walked round for days at a stretch. Jackie