End games
To mark the centenary of what would have been Samuel Beckett’s 100th birthday on April 13 (he died in 1989), Bloomsbury Publishing will be releasing a book of remebrances of the notoriously morbid playwright and novelist. What’s interesting about the recollections — several of which are available on the Guardian’s website — is how Beckett is consistently portrayed as thoughtful, loyal, and funny — hardly the craggy-faced and even craggier-hearted persona he projected. Novelist Paul Auster remembers a “moving speech [Beckett] delivered one afternoon in a Paris cafe about his love for France and how lucky he felt to have spent his adult life there, and the kind and encouraging letters he wrote whenever I sent him something I had published: books, translations, articles about his work.” Eileen O’Casey, singer, actress, and wife of playwright Seán O’Casey, describes Beckett patiently showing her around Paris to find the best bargains on the clothes she needed to buy, while actress Billie Whitelaw relates an incident in which the playwright lovingly attended to her after she passed out during a rehearsal.
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Read the Beckett remembrances on the Guardian site
