THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 16, 1997 TAG: 9702130543
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
SOURCE: BY SORRELL TOWNSEND
LENGTH: 90 lines
DAMMED TO FAME
The Life of Samuel Beckett
JAMES KNOWLSON
Simon & Schuster. 800 pp. $35.
When playwright/novelist/poet/short-story writer/Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett died on Dec. 22, 1989, at the age of 83, the literary world lost its most visible, if not sole, paragon of uncompromising, non-commercial art. In a world filled with book tours, talk-show promotions and celebrity outshining substance, Beckett lived simply, refused interviews and avoided publicity, thereby succeeding purely on the merits of his work.
Beckett's shunning of the limelight only enflamed the popular image of him as a dour, unfriendly, prophet of gloom who wrote humorless works too abstract to comprehend.
Now, James Knowlson, longtime Beckett friend and scholar, has written a biography that explores its subject so extensively that it is impossible for the ghost of this great writer to hide. Employing exhaustive research and interviews (including many talks with Beckett himself during the last year of his life), Knowlson puts a human face on Beckett, shifting the mystery to his works, where it always belonged.
This does not mean that Beckett himself is domesticated in Damned to Fame. On the contrary, for much of the early, heavily detailed accounts of his youth, Beckett comes across as inscrutable, aloof and often unlikable. The book tends to bog down in these sections. But as the narrative continues, relating the death of Beckett's first love, Beckett's own near-fatal stabbing by a Parisian pimp, and the horror of the Nazi occupation of France, a sympathetic, real man emerges.
The young genius appears to have needed adversity and age to transcend his very cleverness and brilliance. Self-consciously elitist early works such as ``Dream of Fair to Middling Women'' lead to the stark, universal poetry of ``Waiting for Godot.''
Knowlson is very adept at relating Beckett's experiences to his writing. Even as the work becomes more abstract, Knowlson anchors it in Beckett's real world. Whether it be Knowlson's mention of Beckett's love for Dante in discussions of such ``closed hell'' visions as in ``The Lost Ones'' or the use of actual memories in such dense, difficult, late works as ``Westward Ho,'' Damned to Fame demonstrates that Beckett always wrote from the heart, no matter how detached he may appear.
Also clearly integral to Beckett's life, success and work were his love-hate relationships with his native Ireland and his eventual wife, Suzanne. Like his mentor James Joyce before him, Beckett found the politics and mores of his homeland so distressing that he settled in Paris. Still, his memories of the Irish countryside and people haunted his work.
His life with Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil was equally complex and troublesome. Without Suzanne doing the leg work of peddling Beckett's plays around Paris, the writer may never have achieved any renown. Eventually, however, it was this success that drove a wedge between the two. They lived together for more than 20 years before getting married, and only did so because Beckett feared that Suzanne would not benefit financially should he predecease her. (He was in his 50s; she in her 60s, when they wed.)
For some time before and after the marriage, the couple lived in separate rooms, with Beckett taking occasional lovers. By her last years, Suzanne seems to have held Beckett so responsible for impairing her life that she didn't even want him around. Beckett was filled with regret at her death and outlived her by only four months.
Once Damned to Fame reaches the early 1950s and the success of ``Waiting for Godot,'' the pace really picks up. Knowlson shares wonderful tidbits, such as the mention of an aborted ``Godot'' production proposed to Beckett, with Buster Keaton and Marlon Brando as the tramps, and the heckling administered by London audiences who could not abide the play's pace.
There is humor here as well, both in the biography and in Beckett's writings. Knowlson relates a wonderful story about an actor who played Lucky in a Berlin production of ``Godot'' talking to Beckett about the significance of all of the proper names he mentions in his speech. The actor had researched these names extensively only to be told by Beckett that names like ``Fartov'' and ``Belcher'' are nothing more than off-color jokes.
After reading about all of Beckett's romantic affairs and his close friendships, his early years of failure, his work for the French resistance in World War II, his blows against apartheid and Communist-bloc oppression, his sense of humor, unfailing generosity and dedication to his art, it is impossible to see Samuel Beckett as the dour prophet again. When the book winds down to the last days of the man who wrote ``nothing to be done'' and ``they give birth astride of a grave,'' it is hard not to shed a tear for his passing as well. MEMO: Sorrell Townsend is an Ann Arbor, Mich., playwright, whose
graduate thesis was on Samuel Beckett. ILLUSTRATION: Samuel Beckett's work succeeded in spite of his lack
of interest in promoting it.