Volume 25, Number 10 · June 15, 1978
The Life of Sim Botchit
By Richard Ellmann
Samuel Beckett: A Biography
by Deirdre Bair
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 736 pp., $19.95
Of all modern writers, the one presumed to be least likely to permit a biography of himself to be written has been Samuel Beckett. Addicted to silences, prone to despair and panic, suffering Job-like boils on his neck and cysts in his anus, practicing what he calls 'baroque solipsism,' no more unwilling subject than Beckett could have been imagined. His aversion to public ceremonies itself became public when, in refuge from the Nobel Prize, he hid out in a Tunisian village, vainly hoping that the press would never track him there. Stomping over his desire for privacy, an American scholar, Deirdre Bair, has managed a scoop which in literary history is like that of Bernstein and Woodward in political history.
Review, 4437 words
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