Images of Beckett - Index of

The cry became a familiar one. But after the age
of 70 the feeling that time was running out for
him made him more desperate than ever before.
‘Damned to fame’, he wrote to me in 1981, quoting
Alexander Pope’s words in The Dunciad and
lamenting the fact that a festival that was being
organised to honour him on his seventy-fifth
birthday would impinge on both his time and his
privacy. 10 ‘I dread the year now upon us’, he wrote
to his friend, the English stage designer, Jocelyn
Herbert, ‘and all the fuss in store for me here [in
Paris], as if it were my centenary. I’ll make myself
scarce while it lasts, where I don’t know. Perhaps
the Great Wall of China, crouch behind it till the
coast is clear.’ 11
Beckett was very reticent in discussing his own
work. He made no attempt whatever to explain
it, when a journalist (with whom he might
exceptionally agree to have a friendly chat, but
never an interview), a critic, or even a friend asked
him what it meant. This arose partly out of a
natural reluctance to dispel the mystery that, for
him, surrounded a work of art. It also stemmed
from his awareness that, as the author, he was, as
he once put it, ‘the worm at the core of the apple’,
unable to view the entire apple from the outside.
As a consequence of this reticence, a second
myth developed that he was difficult, uncooperative
and wilfully obscurantist. Nothing could have
Samuel Beckett, 1973
(Left) Alan Howard and Ben Kingsley in Waiting for Godot,
1997
A PORTRAIT OF BECKETT 7