Customer Reviews

Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist

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For a pretty fat bio, I found this a surprisingly easy and swift read. Cronin, who certainly knows the lay of the land, the type of people, and even some of the actual folks Beckett knew, seems a fair and judicious biographer. I found the book most useful in charting Beckett's development as an artist from the callow "knowingness" of his early novels and poems to the wry despair of his mature work. One is impressed both by Beckett's inconsistent touchiness about the handling of his work by adapters, and by his quiet generosity with near strangers as well as friends. Cronin includes plenty of delightful trivia, from quotes ("I am not a philosopher; one can only speak of what is in front of one and that is simply a mess") to the fact that Beckett always accented the first syllable of Godot.

A careful, highly readable and sometimes very amusing account of the life of the Irish novelist, playwright, theatre director and sports enthusiast. This gives a nuanced and sensitive account of the Irish background from which Beckett at first painfully extracted himself to a new life in France, but which he was always attached to sentimentally and creatively, never being too busy to meet with a young writer from Ireland, or to drink with old Irish friends and wax nostalgic about the Liffey. This book, while generally very admiring (Cronin has no time for the last novel), is actually more discerning and knowledgeable about Beckett's affairs emotional, literary and dramatic, especially in the later years of his career when Cronin was one of the first to write about him at length in the TLS and elsewhere, as well as to meet him and ask questions such as, "Krapp seems to think he had the possibility of happiness...?" To which Beckett calmly replied, "That doesn't mean he did though, does it?"

You get a fair sense of the man and his times, and a more modulated sense of his slow climb to success, even after "Waiting for Godot" made his name. Never has fame seemed less romantic. Cronin is that best of acquaintance-biographers - no fool, but not an assassin either. Fun as well as thorough. I can't think what will come to light to make a better biography possible.

If you seek to understand how a product of the Irish Protestant middle class a century ago managed at an early age to overthrown any certainty brought about by such an upbringing, Cronin offers surmises to this and hundreds of other puzzles in the reticent Foxrock native's life. For a man who so esteemed silence, the impossibility of words to match our inner experiences and their outer raiments, Cronin's herculean cleaning out of the Augean stables, the poring through every scrap penned by Beckett, results in an extraordinarily thorough but never exhausting account ranging six hundred closely printed pages.

As an adopted Dubliner, and as a working writer for fifty years, Cronin adds here to his earlier successes that pondered literary failure, or at least mediocrity, in what passed for bohemian life in the Irish capital of the postwar decade, 1945-55, Dead as Doornails, and in his life of Flann O'Brien/Myles na gCopaleen/Brian O Nolan, No Laughing Matter. Both of these have been reissued recently, and I recommend them to readers curious about how talent can drown its sorrows in too much whisky and its potential in too much talk with too little discipline. While this pair illustrates many anecdotes riotously rendered, the cumulative effect of the two accounts makes for sobering cautionary tales, and how the ghost of Joyce lingered long over last century.

How Beckett managed to extricate himself from the early dominance of Joyce when the two met and depended upon each other however fleetingly in Paris makes for engrossing storytelling. What I noted most of all was how Cronin, through scouring Beckett's records, depicts an author amazingly crippled by maladies mostly psychosomatic, by imagined fears, by phobias befitting indeed his future characters. It takes until 1950 or so for this author, now in his mid-forties, to begin to enter into the period, after `the long siege in the room,' where he could come out of his shell and wrestle with his demons. Having fought, at first for the French Resistance (if his rather circumspect accomplishments fell less than dazzlingly in the Hollywood sense, his danger was no less real and the fate of his comrades no less fatal) and then against his interior desolation, he only then could become, well into middle age, the leader of the avant-garde we know him as, the creator of Godot and Endgame, Krapp and Malone, Molloy and Worm, Winnie and Gogo.

In this brief overview of Cronin's tome, no quotes. But, for anyone needing an excellent précis of what Beckett achieved, chapters 23 and 24 in my estimation serve as a thoughtful and by no means uncritical survey of how Beckett set up scaffolds, erected his plots, and then demolished as much of the structure as the work could stand and still survive.

Of course, his later rather dead-end prose such as How It Is and his tinier plays, or dramaticules, produced as the 1960s and 70s found him caught within the expectations of comedians, scholars, analysts, and audiences, the productions shrank as he seemingly had less to say. As Beckett, at the start of his career, noted of Joyce, the elder Irishman strove to cram the whole of existence into the written word, while his successor sought to eliminate as much of the words and still capture the whole of the same human condition. Two contrasting approaches, intersected by the love of language, the compulsion to manufacture it, and the doubt in any higher purpose than that of the artist driven to create and depict and narrate.

Cronin's energy never flags. I happily measured how well he paces his own story. Godot appears only about 2/3 of the way through, and Cronin never stints on the earlier, more embarrassing malingering of the younger Beckett that presaged his rise to fame and irritated his naturally reclusive nature. His generousity, often remarked upon by those who knew and/or studied him, left many in his debt. Winning the Nobel Prize in 1969, he escaped on an extended holiday and gave away the prize money to a list of deserving up-and-coming writers. One bought a sports car with her windfall.

Cronin, as one who knew and at least once offended Beckett, offers a counterpart to Damned by Fame, which appeared (as biographers often find) immediately prior to his own volume in 1996. James Knowlson, the keeper of the Beckett archive at the University of Reading (where a year's concentration and cash can earn you a MA in Beckett Studies), brought out the authorised biography, with more of the typical trajectory beloved by screenwriters, with Beckett's earlier, more derivatively jaunty, Joycean, or jejune scribblings preparing the way for a blossoming into challenging, disturbing, and, yes, humourous sketches of frailty, despair, and hope.

For Cronin, Beckett's less a secular saint than a hypochondriacal mum's boy who, after coddling and a preparation for respectability, lived the life of the Irish exile (who kept decamping to London and even Dublin often enough) and finally had to grow up, support himself, and push his resources to plumb the darkness within. Out of this, he made stunningly evocative prose, for my tastes some of the best in the 20th century in English, full of cadences that, in the restricted French that he chose so as to limit himself to a harsher diet than that afforded the luxuriant Hiberno-English consumer, ghosted Irishisms, summoned English at its best, and shone through French.

This is a valiant attempt to understand the man and the artist. The slow and unconventional evolution of Beckett's art is well described. This biography is, I feel, honest [in as much as any biography can be such] and does not mythologize. Sad that in Beckett's last days he appeared to be consumed with remorse.

This is a comment ONLY about this edition and publisher, not about Cronin's book, which seems adequately reviewed by other readers.

When it arrived I looked very hard at this book to see if it really was a Da Capo publication and not a bootleg. The paper is the lowest quality, something like cheap copy paper, and the photographs included in the text are almost completely illegible. They have a very heavy screen applied to them, like the screens that came with the very first copy machines that one would place between a photograph and the glass to try to get a legible image. (That didn't work here.) Insult to injury, some of the photographs' proportions have been changed to fit the formatting of the page, compressing faces, or cropped - the tower to which Beckett often retreated in his childhood has had its top lopped off, rendering it very un-tower-like. My feeling when opening the book was one of embarrassment for anyone (if there is anyone) at Da Capo who cares a whit about quality, let alone verity.

It's not even an inexpensive book, at $18 retail for a reprint from another publisher.

I'm sending it back to Amazon, and have just ordered a copy of the 1997 HarperCollins original from AbeBooks.

I've just finished this biography at last, having dipped in and out over the least couple of years. I'm pretty knowledgeable about Beckett, having read just about everything and having immersed myself in criticism. This book is, by far, the most rewarding I have read. It wears theory lightly, has a reflective tone, relishes its subject and portrays Beckett's life with sympathy, humor, intimacy and lovely, easy to read prose. Along with Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett, any reader will gain deep insights into the world of Beckett from Cronin's book. Get this book, and enjoy! Far better than Cohn, Gontarski, Brater, etc, etc, etc.

I have just finished wading through this weighty tome. It is shameful that this author who evidently knew Beckett intimately but did not learn any from him. He makes it clear to us, how Beckett was able to develop a concise reductive approach to his work in which he reduces sentences to a mere phrase.This book need editing dramatically. Cronin waffles for pages and pages about the most tangential issues barely relavent to Beckett's life.On occassion, conjecting as what Beckett may be thinking or not. This goes on for two thirds of his book and then he cuts short the most active period of Beckett's life. A moment that Cronin has the most resources availble to him with documents and personnel. Beckett was a master of language this author should read him.