Word: beckett
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Back in Dublin, Beckett at first played the weary Continental poseur, then, to his parents' horror, degenerated quickly into a bum. The cause was a crippling depression that left him spending weeks bed, curled in the fetal position, his body racked with apparently psychosomatic symptoms: boils, cysts, headaches, flu, bursitis. Beckett tried to fight by drinking heavily and flying into periodic rages. When these attempts failed, he began cultivating an air of contemptuous indifference to the world and its pains. "All I want to do," he told a friend, "is sit on my ass and fart and think...
...bitterly: "I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It was not as though I wanted to write them." Compulsively, he kept on. Not until age 47, when Waiting for Godot created a sensation on the Paris stage, did Beckett escape a hand-to-mouth existence...
...Samuel Beckett performed some brave work with the French Resistance during World War II: He married a woman seven years his senior in 1961 after having lived with her for amost a quarter-century...
With few exceptions, what is most interesting and important about Beckett has transpired in his mind. This is the hardest and riskiest area for a biographer to penetrate, but Bair manages to avoid pop-psych theorizing and to let what facts there are speak for themselves. After a long period of psychoanalysis and a chance attendance at a lecture by Carl Jung, Beckett decided that he had not fully been born. This, he felt, explained his fondness for curling up in dark rooms, his urge to hide from an insistently garish reality. "I'm looking for my mother...
...Beckett's total-loss view of life is as dense and dark as a black hole. Miraculously, his writing provides illumination. He told one of the directors of Godot that "nothing is more grotesque than the tragic," and all of his works prove it. Beckett's clowns and cripples suffer and rant in a world as comic as it is hopeless, comic because it is hopeless. Easy cynics, in literature and life, are a dime a dozen. Bair's biography shows how rigorously and painfully Beckett earned his vision, and with what heroism he prevailed over...