Word: beckett
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...SAMUEL BECKETT: A BIOGRAPHY by Deirdre Bair Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 736 pages...
...Columbia University Ph.D. candidate sent a letter to Samuel Beckett in Paris asking if she could write his biography. This was clearly a folly of youth and inexperience. Everyone knew that scholarly big guns on both sides of the Atlantic were lined up waiting for a shot at the Beckett biography, stymied only by what everyone knew: the Nobel prizewinner would never sit still for any prying into his personal life...
...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...
...join him for the theater, a shooting weekend or dinner at a favorite London restaurant, like Boulestin in Covent Garden. Among his cronies: Merchant Banker Lord Tryon and his Australian wife; Lord Tollemache, heir to a brewing fortune; Insurance Broker Nicholas Soames, a grandson of Winston Churchill; Barrister Richard Beckett. When dining alone, Charles favors light meals (one favorite: scrambled eggs and smoked salmon). He does not smoke, keeps fit by jogging in Windsor Park, seldom drinks anything stronger than dry white wine...