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James Kidd

review of the week

Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett

edited by James and Elizabeth Knowlson

Bloomsbury, $290

It must be in contention for titular tongue-twister of the year. Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett   is an attractive phrase - a syntactic mirror-image,  it parodies the desolate syntax that tripped off Samuel Beckett's  tongue and titles such as Imagination Dead Imagine and Ill Seen Ill Said.

It's also rather confusing, sounding not unlike an avant-garde American poet from the 1950s - an obscure relation of William Carlos Williams, perhaps?  The  subtitle comes to the rescue: Uncollected Interviews with Samuel Beckett & Memories of Those Who Knew Him.

What James and Elizabeth Knowlson have compiled is a piecemeal biography of  Beckett  in his own words, with a little  help from friends such as Billie Whitelaw and Jessica Tandy.

It's a book of two halves. The first part follows Beckett from his middle-class childhood in Ireland to intellectual adulthood in France: here, he met James Joyce and his eventual wife, Suzanne, and joined the Resistance when the  Nazis forced him to flee Paris.

The second section begins with Beckett the struggling artist and ends with Beckett the struggling  literary celebrity. In between, he produced a remarkable body of work.  Waiting for Godot, Endgame, 'The Trilogy', Happy Days, Not I, Texts for Nothing - an inventory  would fill this  page.

A word of warning, though.  The 'uncollected' nature of the interviews shouldn't be confused with new. Much of it  appeared in James Knowlson's excellent 1996 biography, Damned to Fame:  The Life of Samuel Beckett.

Knowlson, who founded the Beckett International Foundation at Reading University, asked permission to write Beckett's  life in 1972, and was refused. In 1989, he tried again and received  this awkward affirmation:  'To biography of me by you it's Yes'.

For five months, Beckett granted Knowlson a weekly audience, and also permitted unprecedented access to his  inner circle, his letters and notebooks. The fruit of these meetings are gathered here  now, aided by concise and  helpful biographical sketches,  handsome photos and some  commissioned essays by, among others, J.M. Coetzee,  Paul Auster and Anthony Minghella.

Its unmediated directness alone ensures that Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett will be one of the best studies released in  this centenary year of his birth.

Birth seems a distinctly un-Beckettian subject to celebrate, and there's some uncertainty about the exact date of his own.  It's usually given as April 13,  1906 - which would make it   Good Friday the 13th. But some sources say the date is premature; others that it's rather late in the day. As an artist, endings were more Beckett's bag, even to the extent of his pun early in First Love, one of his finest short stories, when he has his narrator say: 'Personally, I have no bone to pick with graveyards.'

Beckett's ticklish relationship with birth, however, is just one of many topics that  the Knowlsons' book illuminates brightly.  Among the many anecdotes is one  not found elsewhere in which Beckett talks about a man who claimed  to have regressed to the moment of his birth through hypnosis. At one point during the hypnosis,  the man cried out, 'I've got a terrible pain in my neck.' 'Well,' Becket said, 'the whole thing seemed highly theatrical and suspect. But I liked that. Birth  is a pain in the neck.'

Another gem comes straight from Beckett. While discussing the influence of Christianity on his writing,  he began to sing Abide with Me. The moment seems beyond belief until you read the lines  he chose: they could have come  from a late prose work: 'Abide with me/ Fast falls the eventide/ The darkness deepens/ Lord with me abide'.

These passages highlight  the collection's primary power:  they remember  parts of Beckett other books  pass over. It's  touching to hear Beckett recall how his father hated dogs, to  learn that he loved to play Mozart on the piano, to read him debate morality and the after-life with a German cleaning woman. 'I am not good,' Beckett told her. 'I wear a mask.'

Thanks to the Knowlsons' superb compilation, the mask has slipped, just a little.



Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett