Beckett's Friendship

‘Despite his deep sense of privacy, Beckett’s persona has been so widely written about that it has become unavoidably mixed up in our imagination with what Bernold calls his “creatures”. Whether or not Barthes and Foucault were right to dismiss the figure of the author, when confronted with Vladimir wincing or Krapp hunched over his tape recorder or Molloy resting on his bicycle, one’s mind always seems to turn to the “gentle mask” placed over the “severe ossature” that has been immortalized in John Minihan’s photographs, surely among the most iconic images of the twentieth century. We simply cannot help it.’ (From the translator’s preface) Meeting in the cafés and streets of Paris, with conversations noted and hesitancies observed, the gradual exfoliation of a personality is revealed across the last decade of Beckett’s life as one intellectual appraises another. This is a charming and sympathetic study of one of literature’s most opaque writers and of his interests in music, philosophy, visual arts and the spoken arts. In shedding sympathetic light on a famously private Irishman abroad, these verbal exposures complement John Minihan’s contemporaneous and intimate black-and-white photographs, taken in the same environs.