If something offered itself to your interest, you would exorcise it like Beckett's Watt, who got into the habit of evolving, "from the metiiculous phantoms that beset him, a hypothesis proper to disperse them, as You would conduct your life by the strategy of negation and good riddance. Instead of trying to have life more abundantly, you would insist upon having it barely, and on your own choice terms. Plenitude would be replaced by poverty of experience, attenuation of fellowship, the reduction of daily life to those constituents which a recluse would find congenial: enough food to keep body and soul together, peace, silence, shelter, isolation. But suppose you were to regard life as merely an enforced evil, a long disease, a boring farce: it would follow that the less life you had, the more tolerable your situation. We also think of value in terms of plenitude of experrience, diversity, a certain liveliness of circumstance. Most of us regard life as a good thing rather than a bad thing. But you would imagine not only the possibility of your suicide but, more prudently, a change of values by which your normal sense of life would be reversed. IF you were to read Samuel Beckett's books in the spirit in which they are apparently written, you would not necessarily shoot yourself: if the author has not resorted to the gun, the reader is under no obligation to exceed him in logic or virtue. The quotations are from Beckett's published works. We have added a series of studies of the writer, many shounng him at the time of rehearsals for a prooduction of his work with Jack McG(JUJran. The book, which first appeared in America, has been widely acclaimed.
When the author, Deirdre Bair, approached Beckett, he wrote to a friend 'I will neither help nor hinder her.' In the event he helped her.
The first full biography of Samuel Beckett, Ireland's greatest living writer, is published this month. Denis Donoghue reviews Deirdre Bairs - Life of Samuel Beckett "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on".
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