Volume 43, Number 18 · November 14, 1996
The Painful Comedy of Samuel Beckett
By John Banville
Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett
by James Knowlson
Simon and Schuster, 800 pp., $35.00
Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist
by Anthony Cronin
HarperCollins, 645 pp., £25.00*
The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906-1946
by Lois Gordon
Yale University Press, 250 pp., $28.50
The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989
edited by S.E. Gontarski
Grove Press, 294 pp., $23.00
Eleutheria
by Samuel Beckett, translated by Michael Brodsky
Foxrock, 196 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho
by Samuel Beckett
Grove Press, 116 pp., $11.00 (paper)
How ironic that a writer as chary of public scrutiny as Samuel Beckett should this year be the subject of two very substantial biographies and a biographical study, between them taking up some fifteen hundred large, dense pages, as well as of numerous new critical works to add to what has become a flood of Beckett criticism. While Beckett was still alive, he allowed Deirdre Bair to write a Life, telling her, in a by-now famous phrase, that he would neither help nor hinder her in the task, a formula which Ms. Bair, understandably, took to be the great man's coy way of giving her the go-ahead. When her biography appeared in 1978 it was strongly criticized for what were claimed to be its many inaccuracies and a general misinterpretation of the man and his work. With his characteristic restraint and unwillingness to wound, Beckett made no public comment in the matter, although his silence was taken by many to indicate deep distress.
Review, 6652 words
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