Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett

Rating:
Summary: A Whitewashed and Sanitized Sam.
Review: DAMNED TO FAME: The Life of Samuel Beckett. By James Knowlson. 800 pages. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. ISBN 0-684-80872-2 (hbk).

Although few lives bear looking into too deeply, from an 'Official Biography' of a writer as important as Beckett one expects something better than the mass of distortions, omissions, over and under-emphases, and general slurrings-over that Knowlson offers here in a book that has so many weaknesses it's difficult to know where to begin. There is, in the first place, his almost total suppression of the disastrous effect Beckett's mother had on him; a cold, frigid, and neurotic woman, dominated by notions of class, propriety, decorum, and respectability, who was determined to mold him into her idea of the ideal son who would be respected by Protestant and materialistic upper middle class Dublin society. From Deirdre Bair's more honest account of Beckett's life we learn that he rebelled against this treatment from an early age, and that the psychological torture inflicted upon him by his mother, besides having a lot to do with his flight from Ireland, was ultimately
what was behind his years of emotional misery and repeated bouts of serious physical illness.

But the problem with this book runs deeper, for not only are we not given a fully realized portrait of Beckett's mother, we are not given fully realized portraits of anyone, not even of Beckett himself. Knowlson seems incapable of conveying the essence of character, of making character vivid and memorable, whether through physical description, anecdote, or things they are known to have said. What did it actually feel like to be Beckett as a child growing up in Foxrock? As Portora schoolboy? As Trinity College scholar? As Ecole Normale Superieure lecteur? As friend of Joyce? As struggling writer? As resistance worker? As farm laborer? As, finally, successful and famous? We never really find out. Nor do we find out much about his father, his brother Frank, his long-time companion Suzanne, and his numerous relations, lovers, friends, and personal and professional acquaintances. Many of them crop up constantly in the book, but none of them ever become real. What, for example, was Suzanne, the woman Beckett eventually married, like as a person? What was she like to live with? We never find out.

And there's much more we never find out. Beckett, for example, was enormously interested in the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Why? What were his ideas about Sade? We don't know. Knowlson doesn't tell us. Beckett had a lifelong passion for chess. He is known to have played against opponents as noteworthy as Marcel Duchamp. He even gives us a move-by-move chess game in 'Murphy' and called one of his most important plays 'Endgame.' But what kind of player was Beckett? Did he favor a positional or attacking game? How large was his chess library? Who were his favorite masters? We never find out. Nor are we given transcripts of any of his games. Knowlson is so ignorant of chess that he can even tell us that "Beckett played chess with himself" when what Beckett must obviously have been doing was playing over a master game from one of his books. There is also the matter of Beckett's deep love and respect for animals, a positive trait he seems to have inherited from his mother, and which ought to be evident to even the most superficial reader, but about which Knowlson says nothing, since, like Sade and chess, animals also seem not to be part of Knowlson's mental universe.

Knowlson, in short, gives us no real sense of Beckett and the people around him; ignores many of Beckett's interests and passions; and, most serious of all, fails to explore the single most important formative factor in Beckett's makeup - his extremely complex love-hate relationship with his mother. Throughout his life Beckett suffered horribly from septic and purulent cysts and abscesses which broke out on his neck, in his jaw, palate, and even inside his anus, and which often required surgery and extended periods of convalescence. A steady stream of pus and filth issued from his body (he even entitled some of his poems 'Sanies,' a word which means a bloody and purulent discharge), and it's difficult not to see this, along with the gloom and pessimism which infect his works, as having something to do with the steady stream of rage and hatred that flowed into him from his mother. But all this is a bit too much for Knowlson. He prefers to ignore it. All that he has to offer is a Whitewashed and Sanitized Sam. Anyone who wants a more honest and lively account would be far better off reading Bair:

SAMUEL BECKETT: A Biography. By Deirdre Bair. 736 pages. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. ISBN 0-15-179256-9 (hbk).

Rating:
Summary: tepi.....
Review: for Pete's sake.... Boo Hiss. If you know so much about him that you can make the assertions that you make... why didn't you do the job? I haven't finished the book yet, but I am enjoying it. Knowlson, obviously isn;t a professional biographer per say, but he at least brings many years of critical insight into the subject. And needless to say, if you want a "psychological" study, then we'll have to turn to someone else about his mother problems. Sometimes professional biographers aren't the best to unravel all the complexities of a man like Beckett.

Rating:
Summary: Access to the inaccessible
Review: It's too easy, I think, to criticize an authorized biography as being hagiography. I didn't find that Damned to Fame suffered from particular whitewashing, but then I wasn't reading it with a particular need to see SB picked apart in a personally critical way.

Knowlson was a close personal friend of Beckett's-- a fact which he doesn't try to hide in his treatment. And as such he has access to letters and papers of which other would-be Beckett biographers could only dream. And as a friend, I found that he left the focus in the place that Beckett would have wanted it-- on the work itself, on the vision, on the *writing*.

Which is not to say that he neglects Beckett as a person, it's just to say that Beckett was a deeply private person and I found that Knowlson did an excellent job of balancing the privacy so dear to the subject with discussing what the reader needs to know to understand the artist.

For a casual reader, Damned to Fame might even be *too* exhaustive. I appreciated it, however. Particularly appreciated all the references to what Beckett was reading at various points in his life and I as well appreciated the copious notes and bibliography provided at the end of the book.