MICHAEL E. MOONEY
EPITAPHS FOR A DYING VOICE:
NEW BOOKS ON BECKETT
Samuel Beckett. By Andrew K. Kennedy. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xiv + 175. $34.50.
Why Beckett. By Enoch Brater. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989.
Pp. 144. $19.95.
Two Beckett books in the year when the sixty-year career of our most
renowned author drew slowly to an end. Samuel Beckett died on
December 22, 1989, three days short of Christmas, reversing the myth
of his birth on Good Friday, April 13, 1906. Good Friday's promise, at
odds with the bad luck of Friday the 13th, yields the tragicomic mixture
characteristic of six decades of novels, plays, and poems. The time has
come to place Beckett's achievement in perspective. These two books,
published just before his death, begin the task.
Juvenilia aside, the story begins in 1929. Lecteur d'anglais at l'Ecole
Normale Superieure in Paris, Beckett met James Joyce and published a
short story, "Assumption," in the avant-garde transition and a first,
epigonic work of criticism, "Dante...Bruno. Vico...on Joyce," in
Joyce's Our Exagmination on his Work in Progress. He won a prize
offered by Nancy Cunard's Hours Press for the best work on the subject
of "time," the poem on Descartes, "Whoroscope," and published a still
valuable critical study, Proust, in 1930-31. His career faltered in the
mid-thirties with the still unpublished Dream of Fair to Middling
Women, a richly erudite if often inaccessible novel, parts of which were
salvaged in Beckett's version of Dubliners, a collection of short stories
entitled More Kicks than Pricks (1934). Then came difficult poems
collected in Echo's Bones (1935), still best explicated by Lawrence E.
Harvey in Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (1970), and a work of real
526
0
