Chad Taylor

Bedside reading #2

Lots to write about this. One of the better author biographies I've read, but it's gloomy: his friends and family really did drop like flies. I had the good fortune to attend the recent Complicite production of Endgame which I had mixed feelings about -- I enjoyed it but began to wonder if the author's estate's control over the work was limiting its interpretation. Mostly however, watching Endgame I was struck not by the intellectual play but the human source of its deathly abstractions, in particular the death of his brother, Frank. Prior to that he was grieving for his father's early death and his Parisian comrades who died in the French resistance; after the war, first his mother passed and then the luminous Ethna MacCarthy. Once you take that into account along with his own health problems, the immobile creature in the chair with the kerchief draped over his face seems less of a stylisation. Beckett's was a rough life but it was brightened by his artistic contacts with James Joyce, Nancy Cunard, Marcel Duchamp and others. Knowlson's book includes mention of a time when Beckett and Duchamp whiled away their Occupation days playing chess - can you imagine? Such a scene seems incredible - a layered tableaux.