A chara, I am no authority on the life of Samuel Beckett, but I do admire nearly all of what the man wrote. However, having just finished Professor Knowlson's new biography Damned to Fame, I was offended by Mr Alan Dukes's offhand reference, in his review of the book (October 5th), to Beckett as tennis partner to the luckless Alfred Peron."
Professor Knowlson refers to Alfred Peron as Beckett's closest French friend" through his first two decades in Paris. They were in Trinity together they translated some of Joyce's Work in Progress and Beckett's Murphy, and it was Peron who brought Beckett into the French Resistance in September 1941. I can only assume that Mr Dukes's calling Alfred Peron "luckless" is a reference to his arrest by the Gestapo in August 1942 (after his cell was infiltrated and sold out by a Catholic priest) and his internment in a concentration camp only to die, in Switzerland, a few days after his release in 1945.
Beckett himself might have suffered this same fate had not Peron's wile, Mania, been brave enough to send a telegram warning that the Gestapo were on to him.
After the war, Beckett would have heard the stories of the camps from survivors. He also, as Knowlson points out, read some of the memoirs. He would, no doubt, have learned of the hell that was inflicted on his friend. No one who knows this tragic story can but see how it influenced his outlook and his writing. Listen to Lucky (in Godot) and there, for me, is the ghost of Peron, a man abused starved and beaten, bin spite of the tennis the labours abandoned left unfinished."
Beckett, as Professor Knowlson points out, always remembered his years with Alfred Peron with great fondness. I doubt if he would have thought of Alfred's death as "luckless". I'd say Beckett with his to quote Mr Dukes again "talent for unhappiness" saw it as being just as tragic and painful as all the others who died in those awful years. They give birth astride the grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. Yours, etc., Balrothery, Balbriggan, Co. Dublin.