Samuel beckett a biography by deirdre bair

Deirdre Bair, may she rest in peace, was the first biographer to be permitted by the Master to attempt to infiltrate the impenetrable mist of obfuscation with which he purposefully had always surrounded himself. She was at the time an American former graduate student who lionized his enlightened aura.

She sees Beckett from the outside, being a little wet behind the ears.

Sure, she digs, and in fact was the first to publicly talk of Beckett's certified unstable mental health during and after the War. Beckett's ultimate authorized biographer, James Knowlson, dismissed such claims, though doubtless Bair, in the seventies had able access to interviews with Beckett's wartime confrères.

Hers is an extroverted biography. Perhaps she dug too deep for the writer's liking.

In it, for instance we learn of Beckett’s brief fling with the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, terminated abruptly by Beckett, apparently, as her sophisticated lifestyle may have driven him close to his Dark Side, of which he was petrified.

In my understanding of his tight-lipped silence on that affair, Beckett's short piece First Love (1946) seems to be a radically symbolic and transmogrified treatment of that ill-fated liaison.

À saint manqué, he always placed a very high value on his

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