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death, which never comes). How can the biographer
write about that if the man himself was so active?
Beckett wrote about these things not so much because
he experienced them, although he did, eventually, but
because he observed and felt them impending all the
time. A biographer can only try to understand why he
felt this. In revising an apocryphal story, Knowlson
gives us a hint. Krapp’s story of a Joycean epiphany on
a storm-tossed shore in Krapp’s Last Tape was thought
to be Beckett’s own experience. It turns out that an
equivalent epiphany did occur but in his mother’s
bedroom as he watched her suffer from Parkinson’s
Disease. Krapp’s epiphany is traditionally romantic;
the exaltations of nature provoking a grand idea in the
individual. Beckett’s real one was less effusive.
He saw how nature has ‘a calm, secret hostility’
inflicting intense pain and suffering on loved ones
with pause only for what we call life. It is nothing to
be celebrated. The wordy flights of Beckett’s youthful
writings (that is, before he reached 30) side-step
this awareness in favour of familiar channels of
talent: show-off shock tactics and autobiographical
plundering. So, it is no surprise that Dream Of Fair
To Middling Women, the novel Knowlson and Cronin
mine most heavily for information, is only available
because of the author’s death. He did not want it published
during his lifetime because it was too clever
and derivative. Cleverness tends to be derivative. As
BUY Samuel Beckett books online from and
one critic said, Beckett “had a lot to unlearn”.
However, such bad art enables Knowlson and Cronin
to present convincing portraits of Beckett in young
adulthood. This is where he had most in common with
his contemporaries; he was “a young man with nothing
to say and an itch to make”, as he said of himself.
Cronin is particularly dismissive of a lot of Beckett’s
early itching. He often ends quotations with “Whatever
that might mean.” This is refreshing after the uncritical,
if not also hagiographical tone taken by Knowlson,
Beckett’s long time friend.
One thing Cronin didn’t have that Knowlson did
was access to Beckett’s diaries from his wander around
Nazi Germany in the 30s. These provide an important
revision of Deirdre Bair’s suggestion in her pioneering
1978 biography that Beckett was ignorant of, or chose
to ignore the effect of Nazi rule. The diaries reveal his
awareness and disgust at their attitudes. Indeed, the
people he meets are distinguished by their sympathies.
And the war itself seems to have been the watershed in
Beckett’s life. If he had gone home to Ireland instead
of staying to help his French friends, he may have
continued along familiar lines – following the trends
of the times and fading as fast. However, the stoicism
and near-starvation of the war years seems to have had
a lasting effect. His only concern from then on was to
write, be published, and write some more. Popularity
was not a confirmation of importance, but pure chance.
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