Samuel Beckett, A Biography by Deirdre Bair (review)

Book Reviews SAMUEL BECKETT. A BIOGRAPHY, by Deirdre Bair. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978. 736 pp. $27.25 I am tempted to start this review of Beckett and his first biographer by evoking the mismatched couples in his works. But despite their reciprocal cruelties, each member of Beckett's pairs deeply understands the other. How much understanding is displayed by a biographer who reads: Mercier and Carnier as "voluntary exile, much like Beckett's own . .. the odyssey of Beckett and the other young Irishmen who went to Paris in the 1930's hoping to gain the same success as Joyce ... " (p. 354); The End as "the story about [Beckett'sJ departure from Ireland and settlement in Paris" (p. 273); Waiting for Godol as "a metaphor for the long walk. into Roussillon. when Beckett and Suzanne slept in haystacks .. . during the day and walked by night" (p. 386); Endgame as "a conscious intellectual exercise" (p. 464) whose "spare French prose seemed to become twisted into an effusive English that he was unable to control" (p. 479); Krapp's Last Tape as "one of his most autobiographical writings" (p. 87); Cascando as "rubble or jumbled ruins, which is exactly the situation of the play, with one speaker, the Opener (I'Ouvreur), who directs another, the Voice (Ia Voix)" (p. 542); That Time as "return .. . to his own life" (p. 636); Fooifalls as "another brief text, which seems to dwell on his mother's terminal illness" (p. 636)? I was provoked to this review by such simplistic reduction and by inaccuracies both small (French writers Georges Neveux and not Neveaux [po 4151, and Jules Renard, not Reynard [po639]) and sweeping (" . . . Beckett's French has been heavily tinged with the Irish accent he learned from her" [po32J; but I have heard Jean-Louis Barrault say that Beckett's French is better than his). However, publisher's procrastination and my own have contrived toward the precedence of excellent reviews by Richard EUmann (New York Review of Books), Hugh Kenner (Saturday Review), and especially Martin Esslin (Encounter ), who trenchantly poses the problem of methodology in biography. 315 316 BOOK REVIEWS Esslin documents Bair's lack of qualifications for her 'task: ignorance of European languages and cultures. dependence upon hearsay evidence, collective attributions of her sources of information, fictionalization of her subject, and, worst of aU, insensitivity to the works themselves (despite unacknowledged paraphrase of Beckett critics). My own review is therefore more modest in scope, restricted to what [ know and love best- Beckett's theater. Arriving at Gada, on page 381 of her 640, Bair does not devote the bulk of her Beckett biography to his theater, but what she does is bad enough for me to worry about the most telling point of attack. Perhaps begin with correction of errors? There are no large chunks of dialogue in Mercier and Carnier "which he later transferred directly into Waiting Jar Gada," (p. 354). There is never any doubt that there are four characters in the two-act version of Endgame (p. 463). Beckett did not meet the late Jack MacGowran at the BBC broadcast of AII Tho' Fall, since he was not there (p. 554). Come and Go was written in English, and is not a translation of Va et vienl (p. 580). Breath was not written for Kenneth Tynan (p. 602). Beckett rehearsed not three different actresses, but three different actors, for his German production of Happy Days (p. 617). Ruby Cohn protests her non-affLliation with Bair's "impressions" of the "Willie-Winnie Notes" (p. 517). But this grows tedious. Of Bair's twenty-six chapters, only two are titled by books rather than years - Murphy and Waiting for GodOl. Her discussion of Beckett's best-known work is perhaps the worst chapter of her book. I have quoted her reading of the playas Beckett's wartime experiences, and she ascribes Beckett's dialogue to a phonographic rather than imaginative ear: "It would seem that Beckett took ordinary conversations between himself and Suzanne and incorporated them verbatim in Gada'" (p. 385); "The language Beckett used in Gada, is the language any group of clochards sitting on a bench or in a cafe might...