Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett

James Knowlson's scholarly, yet accessible and gripping, biography of Samuel Beckett enables readers to meet the real man behind his poems (e.g.,"Echoes Bones and Other Precipitates"), his prose ("More Pricks Than Kicks" and "Watt") and his plays (e.g. "Waiting For Godot"). For in sharing details from his long-term friendship with Beckett and offering sensitively written insights into Beckett's hopes and fears throughout his long professional career, as well as this reclusive author's personal loves and losses, Knowlson ensures our increased understanding and enjoyment of Beckett's notoriously complex texts. If you're a new student of Beckett's writing you must try this brilliant book.

If the scale permitted, I would give Knowlson's biography of Samuel Beckett 4 1/2 stars. It is an impressively thorough, passionate, and scholarly work by an ardent admirer. Knowlson's ardor for Beckett, the man no less than the work, is everywhere evident as a predominant strength and an odd occasional weakness. I could not help feeling, every now and then, that it pained Knowlson greatly to have to write anything negative about Beckett. As a biography, it is less emotionally detached than I usually like, but only slightly. It was a compelling read, all 618 pages, which is saying alot.

The review below by Tepi distorts Knowlson's accomplishment and misguides readers to Bair's biography, which relies heavily on supposition and is flat out wrong on the details of Beckett's life in almost countless cases. Tepi expects Knowlson to track Beckett's mother's effect on him throughout the entire piece, but this isn't a psycho-biography; it's a biography that considers the man as a whole, not the man as formed by his mother. This is the standard biography of Beckett because Knowlson has access to more first-hand information than any other. Doesn't hurt to have Beckett's authorization and good graces, either. It is true that the amount of information here is overwhelming, but this makes it the piece that a student of Beckett needs to have, something that one can consult for the rest of one's life. If one wants idle and sensationalistic speculation on Beckett's complexes, then you should waste your money on Bair. The choice shouldn't be hard.

It is too easy, I think, to criticize an authorized biography as being hagiography. I did not find that Damned to Fame suffered from particular whitewashing, but then I was not reading it with a particular need to see SB picked apart in a personally critical way. Knowlson was a close personal friend of Beckett's-- a fact which he does not try to hide in his treatment. And as such he has access to letters and papers of which other would-be Beckett biographers could only dream. And as a friend, I found that he left the focus in the place that Beckett would have wanted it-- on the work itself, on the vision, on the *writing*. Which is not to say that he neglects Beckett as a person. But Beckett was a deeply private person and I found that Knowlson did an excellent job of balancing the privacy so dear to the subject with discussing what the reader needs to know to understand the artist. For a casual reader, Damned to Fame might even be *too* exhaustive. I appreciated it, however. Particularly appreciated all the references to what Beckett was reading at various points in his life and I as well appreciated the copious notes and bibliography provided at the end of the book.

With access to previously unseen letters and documentation, as well as lengthy interviews with family, friends and peers, Knowlson offers the Beckett fan a well-rounded portrait of the late Irish writer that succeeds on a number of points. Firstly, it is a chronological narrative of a life that weaves in social, political, and personal threads without resorting to the psychologizing and speculation of much modern biography. Secondly, it traces Beckett's development as a writer of essays, fiction, poetry and plays without becoming bogged down in lengthy analysis of the writing itself, which is well enough done in a large body of existing critical work. Thirdly, in rendering explicit Beckett's principled political actions, starting with his Resistance work in France, and his open emotional and financial support of friends in the arts community worldwide, it humanizes a man whose myth has tended to foster the persona of hermit or misanthrope.Knowlson is quite upfront about his own twenty-odd year working relationship with Beckett. He is the founder of the Beckett Archive at the University of Reading, has contributed to the critical canon, and had the good fortune to interview his subject at length over a period of many months prior to his death in 1989. Yet this does not come across as an acolyte's toadying; rather, it resonates as a sincere appreciation of a man and his work.