Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett

"A multifaceted picture. Unlike other biographies of Beckett that tended to push a particular dimension of his life, be it a psychological one or, in Cronin’s case , the importance of the Irish context, I think that Knowlson’s biography is the most well-rounded. It’s also the most scholarly of them. If Knowlson is citing somebody or something, I can find it in the footnotes. The footnotes of the biography are in many ways just as illuminating as the main text. The particular picture of Beckett that emerges is one that is not hagiographic, that’s for sure. It’s an objective, well-balanced, informed one. The phrase ‘Damned to Fame’ is taken from a letter that Beckett wrote and cites the Dunciad . Several critics argue against this, but I think Beckett generally struggled with fame in the sense that he was a very private man. He was very happy that his plays were successful; like any writer, he was happy to be read. But his refusal to interpret his texts as far as possible—his refusal to give interviews or be employed by publishing houses to play, as it were, the publishing game—speaks a lot to his own attitude toward his work. I genuinely think he did shy away from that kind of publicity, whereby the author was the centre of attention, rather than the work. For him, the work and the representation of the work were far more important to him than his persona as a writer or an artist. I think we need to remember that Beckett’s critical successes were not necessarily commercial successes. If you speak to any of the main publishing houses, I think they will tell you that the plays sell reasonably well and, clearly, there is a lot of commercial success with actual stagings of Beckett’s plays. But I don’t think any of these publishing houses would be able to say that their prose editions are selling out. It’s quite telling that if you go to most Waterstones in this country, you will find perhaps one or two books by Beckett. What we have here is a disunity between his critical appraisal—everyone thinks of Beckett as this major writer of the 20th century—which doesn’t translate into commercial success. “I think we need to remember that Beckett’s critical successes were not necessarily commercial successes.” Beckett himself was famously dismissive of most of his work. When Godot was finally a success, he said he’d “breathed deep” of the “vivifying air” of failure all his writing life, that it didn’t really make a difference to him. Beckett was nearly fifty when Godot was a success. He was born in 1906 and the first performance of Godot was in 1953. He’s no longer a young writer; he’s been writing, as it were, on the margins. In particular, he had hardly published. Before the switch to writing in French and the publications of his prose trilogy in Paris just after the war, Beckett was not a household name. There were very few people who would have known of Beckett’s work. We’ve got to remember that. But Beckett was his own harshest critic. He didn’t allow many of his early works to be reprinted until pressure from both the Nobel Prize and publishing houses pushed him to do so. More Pricks Than Kicks , for example, was published in 1934, but you couldn’t get a copy of it until it was reissued just after he won the Nobel Prize. He also refused to translate some of his works until much later. Premier amour —‘First Love’ —is a nice example of that; it takes him two decades to translate it. Beckett was always more interested in the next project than in keeping his past catalogue, as it were, alive. Obviously, there were texts that he preferred over others. It was very clear that Endgame was the one that he “dislikes least” and the phrasing is nice there; it’s the one he dislikes least, rather than his favourite. When he talks about his work, it’s usually with a negative prefix. Yes, Beckett was inconsistent on that. He could be quite lenient with friends and people he trusted—directors, in particular. He did allow Mabou Mines to adapt prose texts, with ‘The Lost Ones” as a famous example. If there was a respect for the actual text, for the actual work itself, then he could be quite lenient. But there were certain things that he just wouldn’t accept. He very clearly did not want an all-female cast for Waiting for Godot, not for any ethical or gender-based reasons, but because it just didn’t work. He famously said that the whole joke about the prostate just wouldn’t work. So, again, it’s about the text. When he was strict about it, it was because he felt that the text was being changed into something that it wasn’t. Whereas, if it came to different stagings, I think he could be far more flexible on that. It’s not a black and white situation. At one point, he said that he doesn’t want texts written in a certain medium to be adapted into another one, but at other times he’s quite open to it. He says yes to some of these adaptations and he even makes them himself, after all. He adapts ‘ Not I ’, written for theatre, to television. So, it simplifies the matter to say that Beckett was strict about how things should be performed. But, of course, there were certain things he disliked and he put his foot down."