Skip to main content

Parisian Lives by Deidre Bair review – deliciously indiscreet about Beckett and De Beauvoir

Buying drinks and rebuffing sexual advances ... the literary biographer reveals all about the process of writing two acclaimed lives

When Samuel Beckett agreed to let Deirdre Bair write his biography, everyone assumed it was because he was sleeping with her. The year was 1971 and there could be no other explanation as to why the reclusive Grand Old Man of Irish and European letters should bestow a pearl of such great price on a young American with no more than a recent PhD to her name. Evil-minded gossip flew around the obstreperous ragtag of ivy league professors, Irish poets, Parisian intellectuals and New York critics who had appointed themselves gate-keepers of the Beckett universe. If anyone was going to write about the author of Waiting for Godot, Molloy and Krapp’s Last Tape, they had always imagined it would be them. Now, it transpired, this American had pillow-talked her way into the literary gig of the century while they had been busy going to international Beckett conferences, getting drunk in Dublin pubs or fretting about why “Sam” hadn’t replied to their last three letters.

Yet as Bair reveals in what she calls her “bio-memoir”, the Nobel laureate never bothered to conceal his erotic indifference to the earnest, happily married woman who had cheekily suggested that she was the best person to write his life.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3cffcDN
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Thirty Years of Adonis film review: sexually explicit gay drama mixes porn and pomposity

1/5 stars The line between soft-core porn and pompous art-house cinema grows ever finer in the seventh feature by writer, director and producer Danny Cheng Wan-cheung, also known as Scud. Intended as a philosophical statement about the meaninglessness of life, Thirty Years of Adonis instead comes across as a badly misjudged piece of sensationalist filmmaking. God’s Own Country review: gay love story set in the Yorkshire countryside The film revolves around aspiring gay actor Adonis Yang... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2qgQkop
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more