Customer Reviews

Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett

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The review below by Tepi distorts Knowlson's accomplishment and misguides readers to Bair's biography, which relies heavily on supposition and is flat out wrong on the details of Beckett's life in almost countless cases. Tepi expects Knowlson to track Beckett's mother's effect on him throughout the entire piece, but this isn't a psycho-biography; it's a biography that considers the man as a whole, not the man as formed by his mother.

This is the standard biography of Beckett because Knowlson has access to more first-hand information than any other. Doesn't hurt to have Beckett's authorization and good graces, either. It is true that the amount of information here is overwhelming, but this makes it the piece that a student of Beckett needs to have, something that one can consult for the rest of one's life. If one wants idle and sensationalistic speculation on Beckett's complexes, then you should waste your money on Bair. The choice shouldn't be hard.

With access to previously unseen letters and documentation, as well as lengthy interviews with family, friends and peers, Knowlson offers the Beckett fan a well-rounded portrait of the late Irish writer that succeeds on a number of points. Firstly, it is a chronological narrative of a life that weaves in social, political, and personal threads without resorting to the psychologizing and speculation of much modern biography. Secondly, it traces Beckett's development as a writer of essays, fiction, poetry and plays without becoming bogged down in lengthy analysis of the writing itself, which is well enough done in a large body of existing critical work. Thirdly, in rendering explicit Beckett's principled political actions, starting with his Resistance work in France, and his open emotional and financial support of friends in the arts community worldwide, it humanizes a man whose myth has tended to foster the persona of hermit or misanthrope.

Knowlson is quite upfront about his own twenty-odd year working relationship with Beckett. He is the founder of the Beckett Archive at the University of Reading, has contributed to the critical canon, and had the good fortune to interview his subject at length over a period of many months prior to his death in 1989. Yet this does not come across as an acolyte's toadying; rather, it resonates as a sincere appreciation of a man and his work.

It is too easy, I think, to criticize an authorized biography as being hagiography. I did not find that Damned to Fame suffered from particular whitewashing, but then I was not 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 does not 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. But 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.

At the time I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Beckett's novels, back in the early '70s, there was no such thing as a biography of the man, only journalistic gossip and sidelong comments from scholars, such as Ruby Cohn, who had developed personal friendships with him in the course of their critical work. When Deirdre Bair's biography appeared in 1978, I read it with much interest, but soon with much disappointment. In addition to evident errors of fact (even in light of what little we otherwise knew at that point), the general level of analysis left much to be desired and rarely seemed to pull the writer and the work within hailing distance. After reading the first volume of Beckett's letters, which appeared recently, I was inspired (wrong word, Beckett would undoubtedly say) to pick up a copy of James Knowlson's "Damed to Fame" (1996). This is an absolutely excellent exercise, carefully supported by the evidence at every point, including material from extensive interviews conducted with Beckett during the last years of his life. One will even find notes correcting Bair's errors. If you want to know Beckett, with all the nuances, this is the biography to get--the writing is carefully crafted and, for the most part, highly readable (assuming one knows a bit about Beckett, or is interested enough to learn), only marred occasionally by unnecessarily melodramatic passages.

James Knowlson is both a preeminent Beckett scholar, and cherisher of Beckett's friendship and memory. There is thus in his biography a degree of caring, and perhaps too a degree of personal protection. Nonetheless it provides any student of Beckett with a wealth of new information to enhance our knowledge of a great writer, but not solve completely the mystery and meaning of his greatness.
Joyce , Beckett's boss, and great inspiration , taught him the meaning of total dedication to the craft. But Joyce also gave him the key negative example. The feary father was greedy, and always added on and made more words than any other maker could possibly contend with . So Beckett chose a contradictory technique and became the great minimizer, the great substractor, the master of 'Less is More'.
One reviewer on the Amazon site(Tepi)excoriates Knowlson for playing down the emotional and psychological drama and difficulty of Beckett's life, of underestimating the role the cold mother played on her creator son. The criticism too of the biography is that it does not come to life in providing real portraits of the real people in Beckett's life, including the companion of twenty - years Susan.
Nonetheless I believe in general we search for the good in the book, value what it gives us. And this book does give us much new detail about a master in the art of making meaning out of what is smaller.
My own reading of Beckett goes back a long way in misunderstanding and appreciation. I in reading years ago the trilogy of novels felt that Beckett comprehended a basic aspect of human experience, in old age and dying, in a way no one else had. He made into 'Literature' kinds of experience which had not been made into Literature before.
His fierce inner poetry the Irish lyric spirit was strong in him as Joyce.
A biography can provide us details and insights into the life, and even the creative process of a master, but it cannot solve the mystery of great creation which always has within it something of a ' divine gift' a ' surprise' that even the creator himself cannot fully understand.

If the scale permitted, I would give Knowlson's biography of Samuel Beckett 4 1/2 stars. It is an impressively thorough, passionate, and scholarly work by an ardent admirer. Knowlson's ardor for Beckett, the man no less than the work, is everywhere evident as a predominant strength and an odd occasional weakness. I could not help feeling, every now and then, that it pained Knowlson greatly to have to write anything negative about Beckett. As a biography, it is less emotionally detached than I usually like, but only slightly. It was a compelling read, all 618 pages, which is saying alot.

Considering the voluminous experience garnered by his subject, James Knowlson does a good job in this depiction of a great writer and and even greater personality - a life that showed about as much integrity as is possible in this time on earth. Since Knowlson knew Beckett for many years, he was intimate with aspects of the life of Beckett that would elude other biographers.

Yet, as good as this book is, it could have been better in that it gets awfully windy with inconsequential and petty details. Do we really need to know about Beckett's bouts with the flu, or the morbid details of so many friend's deaths over his eight decades? The fact that there are 125 (!)pages of footnotes makes one wonder where the copyeditor was on this book. Richard Ellman's "James Joyce" has but 65 pages, and that is way too many. Was Knowlson trying to outwrite Ellman on this bio or what? It sure is hard on the reader when footnoted material that should have been folded into the text is not. I suppose this is what is referred to as "exhaustive detail".

In spite of my items of critique, this is still a good book and an invaluable resource for those interested in one of the 20th Century's literary giants. The bibliography is a valuable compilation in itself.

As far as the Tepi review, it is overblown with false characterizations.
Knowlson actually does depict the emotional struggle between Beckett and his domineering mother, while Beckett's life with Suzanne is adequately told. This is one review best ignored.

Recommended reading.

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James Knowlson's scholarly, yet accessible and gripping, biography of Samuel Beckett enables readers to meet the real man behind his poems (e.g.,"Echoes Bones and Other Precipitates"), his prose ("More Pricks Than Kicks" and "Watt") and his plays (e.g. "Waiting For Godot"). For in sharing details from his long-term friendship with Beckett and offering sensitively written insights into Beckett's hopes and fears throughout his long professional career, as well as this reclusive author's personal loves and losses, Knowlson ensures our increased understanding and enjoyment of Beckett's notoriously complex texts. If you're a new student of Beckett's writing you must try this brilliant book.

Reading this book was an agonizing experience. I love Beckett's work, but Knowlson's obsequiousness is almost too much to bear. According to Knowlson, Beckett was a saint in every aspect of his life, and any hint of bad behavior (his drinking, infidelity, general intractability, angry outbursts, etc.) is either neatly sidestepped or explained away at great length. I think these sides of his personality are fascinating (especially in the context of his works and writing process), but instead of exploring them Knowlson chooses to assemble a 700+ page laundry list of Beckett's daily activities -- interspersed, of course, with cloying descriptions of Beckett's utter selflessness. True analysis, either of the man's character or of his works, is completely absent from this work.

Don't waste your time with this, seriously. I'm sure there's a better Beckett biography out here -- maybe not as exhaustive as this one, but probably a great deal more interesting. And if you want a good example of what literary bio can and SHOULD be, read Richard Ellman's James Joyce. It's stunningly beautiful, and Beckett himself makes an appearance near the end!

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).