IN her introduction, Professor Lois Gordon presents her book as a corrective to the controversial (and somewhat fictional)image of Beckett that arises from the pages of Deirdre Bair's biography (first edition 1978, new edition 1990). This is an admirable objective: Blair's Beckett - a moody, irascible, guilt ridden figure, afflicted with a barrage of psychosomatic disorders (much like one of his fictional characters) - needs substantial revising before the full man is revealed. It should go without saying that a literary biography is not necessarily the place where we go to find the "full" person but we expect, at a minimum, to be put in possession of the facts. Bair's biography gave us many of those (which is why her book is so useful) but marshalled them into a narrative that reads as if it was written by a scribe who learnt her trade on the Book of Job.
Gordon's approach is quite promising: she does not necessarily dispute the facts as adduced by Bair, but rigorously questions the interpretative slant given to them. For example, Gordon's treatment of Beckett's London years (1933-36) delivers an image of a young writer trying to ply his trade amid the ferment and cacophony of a diverse cultural and political scene rather than Bair's one of a seedy solipsist on the slippery slope to a slap up psychosis. As Gordon rightly points out, Beckett reserved that fate for his fictional Murphy, whose London career is a heavily ironised version of Beckett's. The incinerated remains of Murphy's body, mind and soul end up mixed with the butts, spits and vomit on a saloon floor, whereas Beckett had more than half a century of matchless productivity in front of him. Similarly, Gordon's treatment of Beckett's involvement in the French Resistance goes way beyond Bair's. Bair had taken her cue from Beckett's modest dismissal of his active service as "boy scout's stuff" and had undervalued the bravery, loyalty to friends and wholehearted rejection of fascist politics which Beckett's activities indicate. Gordon's Beckett is a much more interesting man, intimately acquainted with the depravity of human nature and the precariousness and preciousness of human dignity. The lengthy ban he placed on the sale and performance of his work in South Africa and the two year ban (1958-60) on performances in Ireland offer ample testimony of his rejection of degraded morality.
Gordon's book is not, properly speaking, a literary biography but rather a detailed portrait of the historical, social and cultural contexts within which Beckett had his being. She provides chapters on Ireland, London, prewar Germany and France, on wartime Paris, and the south of France. There is also a pair of chapters on the significance and value of Joyce and Jack Yeats to Beckett. The extensive Notes (the book is not equipped with a bibliography) indicate that Professor Gordon has come to her views after an exhaustive trawl of the secondary materials.
Injudicious reliance on such materials can often lead to misapprehensions: this is particularly the case in the chapter on Ireland. Gordon is both confused and confusing on the pattern and sequences of historical events, imagining that the Easter Rising was an event in the Civil War, imagining that in 1923 (the year Beckett entered Trinity College) sectarian violence was a common occurrence in Dublin, and imagining that in 1928" (when he taught at Campbell College) Beckett witnessed racial riots in Belfast. Revisionists will be disheartened to be informed that the Easter Rising, despite the countermanding order, went ahead on Easter Monday, "a bank holiday when most Dubliners were out of town". Given that the urban sector only a few hundred yards east of the GPO contained some of the most overcrowded and insanitary tenements in Europe, it is surely a gross oversight of historians and sociologists that we have no first hand records of the Easter exodus of the hooded hordes with prams and pushcarts bound for their salubrious dachas on the coast.
While some of Professor Gordon's historical misapprehensions lead to fantasy, others display her, complete failure to enter into a sympathetic understanding of her subject. Twice Gordon claims that Beckett "performed the most boring and menial of tasks" when he worked with the Irish Red Cross in the establishment of a hospital in Saint Lo in Normandy. He was storekeeper, driver, interpreter and rat catcher. It is worth reminding ourselves of what he wrote of his and his co workers experience in that shattered town: "[S]ome of those who were in Saint Lo will come home realising that they got at least as good as they gave, that they got indeed what they could hardly give, a vision and sense of a time honoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again." In the duty of reconstructing civil society out of the postwar ruins, no task is menial. Yeats may blithely have written that "All things fall and are built again/And those that build them again are gay", but Beckett's experience brought him into direct contact with what we call "collateral damage" and a lively understanding of the moral imperative of reparation.
Professor Gordon's book is handsomely designed and bound by Yale University Press, but the copy editing is uncharacteristically slipshod.