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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com had finally caught up with his vision. Digital editing allowed him absolute control over the movie’s execution, rather than the fraught creation of Star Wars. Ultimately Baxter’s biography portrays Lucas as a maverick who refused to kowtow either to Hollywood or to accepted notions of what makes a movie picture. BUY John Baxter books online from and It’s an immensely readable account that will appeal to Star Wars aficionados and film fans alike. It also acts as a fascinating overview of the way the movie industry has changed over the last 25 years and how much Lucas’ independence and interest in exploiting technology helped shape that change. � 066 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Feature [published December 1996] Samuel Beckett: Beyond Biography Despite two recent authoritative biographies, Stephen Mitchelmore argues that Beckett remains an enigma It has not been easy assimilating Beckett into our culture. While his mentor James Joyce made with ease the familiar journey from public outrage and bewilderment to universal love and admiration, Beckett, seven years after his death, remains as distant as ever. He wouldn’t have had it any other way. His fame is due to a play which he said was “misunderstood”. For a great Modern writer to become well known it seems he or she requires a degree of similarity to popular fiction to tempt people into reading them. Kafka has horror, Proust nostalgia, Lawrence pornography, Woolf niceness. Beckett seems to lack this. Only Waiting For Godot approaches such familiarity: Morecambe & Wise in a mortuary perhaps. The rest of the work lurks behind it like a black hole ready to swallow up any cheerful soul wanting something less than an enigma. This suggests we need a biography to help us through the artifice. And these two new biographies certainly do something like that. After reading both Anthony Cronin’s The Last Modernist and James Knowlson’s Damned To Fame, one has a more rounded impression of the man, if not the BUY Samuel Beckett books online from and writer. Reading the novels and plays one imagines a secular monk, yet the dominant impression from both of these biographies is of a drunken, womanizing, pretentious and self-pitying young man who was good at sport and languages. I say “young man” because the older, wiser Beckett is left relatively untouched. We never get very close to him. This is a pity if not also inevitable. The pre-war work is discussed at length as it tends to follow the details in the turmoil of his growth: a manic-depressive mother, psychosomatic illnesses, premature death of a genial father, archetypal Oedipal love/sex dichotomy, unchannelled talent, etc. The later works, however, do not lend themselves so readily to such links. And these, despite the protestations of the nosy, will be the ones he will be remembered for. They are passed over almost in silence. This is not because Knowlson and Cronin are hacks interested only in gossip and obvious life-work correlations, or because the later work is lifelessly abstract, but because they are both aware of the crassness of such an enterprise. The later work is the poetry of confinement, of disintegration and ending (that is, what comes before 067 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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