Should politicians admit to loving Samuel Beckett?

British Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg professed his love for Samuel Beckett in a Guardian column on Friday. He wrote that Beckett’s work seems more and more subversive to him as the years go by. “It’s that willingness to question the things the rest of us take for granted that I admire most about Beckett; the courage to ask questions that are dangerous because, if the traditions and meanings we hold so dear turn out to be false, what do we do then?”

A bit of a risky statement for a politician, no? Maybe less so for a Brit. The column sparked discussion in the blogosphere over whether or not an American politician would be lambasted for admitting to Beckett-induced existential crises. The Guardian’s Michael Tomasky (an American) was impressed with Clegg.

“You British folks understand, don’t you, that if an American presidential candidate said his hero was Samuel Beckett, he’d be finished. I mean totally finished. He couldn’t even get away with an American equivalent…

“Who’s the American Beckett, Eugene O’Neill? You’d immediately have right-wing blogs (because obviously only a Jesus-hating Democrat would ever conceivably say such a thing) combing through every word the guy ever wrote looking for signs of lack of patriotism, sexual mischief and other alien traits.”

American political blogger Matthew Yglesias disagreed.

“I think Tomasky is actually wrong that it would be deadly. Presidential elections are overwhelmingly determined by the fundamentals. I think people used to think that you couldn’t win a presidential election while being a black man named ‘Barack Hussein Obama’ whose autobiography admits to cocaine use and who used to represent Hyde Park in the State Senate while attending a black nationalist church. It just turns out that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our narrow conventional wisdom.”

Bookmarks: Moore on Barthelme, Updike on Cheever, plus more shakeups in the U.S. retail sector

Sundry links from around the Web:

• Lorrie Moore reviews the new Donald Barthelme biography (you can hear her thoughts here).
• The late John Updike had an early look at the John Cheever biography.
• Apparently, one of the century’s great correspondents was Samuel Beckett, “the man who said ‘every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.’”
• More layoffs at Borders. This time, the retailing giant cuts 742 jobs (nearly 3% of its workforce), most of them managerial positions at its superstores.
• Meanwhile, competitor Barnes & Noble buys e-book retailer Fictionwise.com for $15.7-million.
• A surefire pick-me-up: Author Tobias Wolff, onstage with John Darnielle (aka The Mountain Goats) in New York City. Wait for the chorus, when the grandfatherly Wolff chimes in.

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.

Related links:
Read the Beckett remembrances on the Guardian site