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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
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