Word: bair
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SAMUEL BECKETT: A BIOGRAPHY by Deirdre Bair Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 736 pages...
...Bair neatly captures this offbeat union: "She catered to all his comforts, seeing that he had food, clean laundry and linen, and he allowed her to live in his apartment and do all that she wanted...
...Beckett did just that for Deirdre Bair. He said he would neither help nor hinder her, but then proceeded to do things that looked suspiciously like help: answering questions, writing letters of introduction, letting friends and associates know that they could cooperate or not with the young biographer as they pleased. Many hundreds did, and Biographer Bair had six years of work cut out for her. They were worth it. Samuel Beckett could have come swaddled in doctoral dissertationese, a hedging, clotted tongue as dead as ancient Babylonian. Instead, the book is a model of judicious, lively scholarship, an impressive...
...large facts of Beckett's life are fairly well known, and Bair adds nothing major to them. But her accretion of small details softens the hard edges of Beckett's known past and published works. Born into a prosperous Irish Protestant family in 1906, Beckett was a crashingly normal, if sometimes diffident lad up through his graduation from Trinity College, Dublin. His skill with languages brought him a two-year fellowship in Paris and the promise of a teaching post at Trinity when he finished. In Paris, Beckett joined the circle of acolytes surrounding James Joyce; the young...
Cheatham old and a native of Philadelphia ranked second behind Bair with the citizen groups and second behind Seymour Grechko of Detroit who had withdrawn earlier with the teachers and students...