Illuminations of the Grotesque

By Paul Gray

SAMUEL BECKETT: A BIOGRAPHY by Deirdre Bair Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 736 pages; $19.95

In 1971 a Columbia University Ph.D. candidate sent a letter to Samuel Beckett in Paris asking if she could write his biography. This was clearly a folly of youth and inexperience. Everyone knew that scholarly big guns on both sides of the Atlantic were lined up waiting for a shot at the Beckett biography, stymied only by what everyone knew: the Nobel prizewinner would never sit still for any prying into his personal life.

Yet Beckett did just that for Deirdre Bair. He said he would neither help nor hinder her, but then proceeded to do things that looked suspiciously like help: answering questions, writing letters of introduction, letting friends and associates know that they could cooperate or not with the young biographer as they pleased. Many hundreds did, and Biographer Bair had six years of work cut out for her. They were worth it. Samuel Beckett could have come swaddled in doctoral dissertationese, a hedging, clotted tongue as dead as ancient Babylonian. Instead, the book is a model of judicious, lively scholarship, an impressive translation of an enigma into a man.

The large facts of Beckett's life are fairly well known, and Bair adds nothing major to them. But her accretion of small details softens the hard edges of Beckett's known past and published works. Born into a prosperous Irish Protestant family in 1906, Beckett was a crashingly normal, if sometimes diffident lad up through his graduation from Trinity College, Dublin. His skill with languages brought him a two-year fellowship in Paris and the promise of a teaching post at Trinity when he finished. In Paris, Beckett joined the circle of acolytes surrounding James Joyce; the young Irishman's first published work was an essay championing his senior countryman. Joyce's daughter Lucia, who was drifting into the schizophrenia that would eventually disable her, fixated on Beckett as a soul mate. She knew her man.

Back in Dublin, Beckett at first played the weary Continental poseur, then, to his parents' horror, degenerated quickly into a bum. The cause was a crippling depression that left him spending weeks bed, curled in the fetal position, his body racked with apparently psychosomatic symptoms: boils, cysts, headaches, flu, bursitis. Beckett tried to fight by drinking heavily and flying into periodic rages. When these attempts failed, he began cultivating an air of contemptuous indifference to the world and its pains. "All I want to do," he told a friend, "is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante."

He did much more, of course. He wrote furiously, turning out book after book that the world ignored. Murphy, his first novel, was rejected by 42 publishers. He complained bitterly: "I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It was not as though I wanted to write them." Compulsively, he kept on. Not until age 47, when Waiting for Godot created a sensation on the Paris stage, did Beckett escape a hand-to-mouth existence.

Samuel Beckett performed some brave work with the French Resistance during World War II: He married a woman seven years his senior in 1961 after having lived with her for amost a quarter-century.

Bair neatly captures this offbeat union: "She catered to all his comforts, seeing that he had food, clean laundry and linen, and he allowed her to live in his apartment and do all that she wanted for him."

With few exceptions, what is most interesting and important about Beckett has transpired in his mind. This is the hardest and riskiest area for a biographer to penetrate, but Bair manages to avoid pop-psych theorizing and to let what facts there are speak for themselves. After a long period of psychoanalysis and a chance attendance at a lecture by Carl Jung, Beckett decided that he had not fully been born. This, he felt, explained his fondness for curling up in dark rooms, his urge to hide from an insistently garish reality. "I'm looking for my mother to kill her," says the narrator of The Unnamable. "I should have thought of that a bit earlier, before being born." Beckett's own austere, tyrannical mother hounded him and his thoughts; he could not stand to be with her and writhed with guilt when he was away. His succinct comment: "What a relationship!"

Beckett's total-loss view of life is as dense and dark as a black hole. Miraculously, his writing provides illumination. He told one of the directors of Godot that "nothing is more grotesque than the tragic," and all of his works prove it. Beckett's clowns and cripples suffer and rant in a world as comic as it is hopeless, comic because it is hopeless. Easy cynics, in literature and life, are a dime a dozen. Bair's biography shows how rigorously and painfully Beckett earned his vision, and with what heroism he prevailed over it.

Excerpt

"To the dismay of some of his friends, Beckett began to imitate Joyce's mannerisms. He dangled his cigarettes carelessly from limp-wristed hands. Although he was nearsighted, his eyes were not then seriously troublesome, but he held books and papers up close to his glasses in the same attitude of languid exhaustion that Joyce affected in order to cover his very real inability to see clearly.

Beckett even wore pointed-toe patent leather pumps that were too small because he wanted to wear the same shoe in the same size as Joyce, who was very proud of his small, neatly shod feet. Joyce had been vain about his feet since his youth, when poverty forced him to go about Dublin in a pair of white tennis shoes, the only footwear he owned. It is impossible to know if Joyce was even aware of Beckett's slavish gesture, for his eyes were so weak that he saw very little. What is intriguing about this imitative gesture is the sacrificial element involved in the picture of Beckett, suffering terribly from huge corns and terrible calluses, walking only with great pain. He must have pulled off his shoes in much the same way as his character, Estragon, pulls off his horrible misshapen boots in the first act of Waiting for Godot with a sigh of infinite relief."

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