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He seems to have realized that what was important was
the night sky of nothingness behind the pyrotechnics of
culture (a phrase of his friend E.M. Cioran).
Beckett started to write in French to rid himself of as
much English cultural baggage as possible. His style
became radically spare. He refused the big picture. Indeed,
the claustrophobia of later plays and prose is not
far removed from the details of war, or at least impending
war: terror, boredom, despair, confusion, gallows
humour, and imprisonment. Being alone in a room with
only thoughts and memories is not lifelessly abstract.
It is the experience of millions of people. To label it
solipsistic or elitist, as many people have, is narrowminded
in the extreme. To write from the perspective
of ‘outside’, which many much-touted writers still do
(Pat Barker, Irving Welsh et al), is far more abstract and
non-empathetic. Even if these claim to be the voice of
the lost, silenced or the underclass, their conservative
attitude to language annexes the ground where these
voices might speak. Their sympathy is the cruelty
of the sentimental that Wilde spoke of. They silence
everybody in their powerful cries from the trenches of
literary tradition.
Beckett is the writer par excellence of what it is to be
totally alone, separate even from the self you thought
you were. Inevitably, this leads to a different kind of
language; neither formal nor colloquial. For Beckett,
language is not so much the meadow where the self
BUY Samuel Beckett books online from and
can frolic in freedom as a No Man’s Land where it
is never safe. Beckett was not one of herd playing at
freedom-loving in the tenches, but wandered the No
Man’s Land like Dante in Hell. It was not a deliberate
exercise. He was often surprised at what he wrote. It
is not purely intellectual. It was not ‘self-expression’,
more ‘unself-expression’. If it was merely the surface
self, fiction would be only disguised autobiography and
these biographies would be even more superfluous than
they already are. Both Knowlson and Cronin are aware
of this and do not try to pin Beckett’s devastating later
work to what was happening in his life or his world. At
least, not directly. They are aware of the acultural provenance
of his inspiration. The biographies are works
borne of our literary culture’s desire for short cuts, yet
carry that restriction with honour.
Beckett was aware of a saying in post-war literary
French circles that if an Englishman were to write a
book on a camel he would call it The Camel, while
a Frenchman would call it The Camel And Love. A
German, on the other hand, would call it The Absolute
Camel. All the books, of course, would probably be the
same. Both authors reviewed here are Irish, and perhaps
it is inevitable they would think of something odd
for the titles of their books. And they have. Damned
To Fame, despite being a phrase from one of Beckett’s
letters, is a peculiarly limited title, and Cronin’s The
Last Modernist is absurd. This tempts the assumption
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