Beckett's Friendship

Meeting in the cafés and streets of Paris, with  conversations noted and hesitancies observed, the gradual exfoliation of a personality is revealed across the last decade of Beckett’s life as one intellectual appraises another. This is a charming and  sympathetic study by André Bernold of one of literature’s most opaque writers and of his interests in music, philosophy, visual arts and the spoken arts. In shedding sympathetic light on a famously private Irishman abroad, these verbal exposures complement John Minihan’s contemporaneous and intimate black-and-white photographs, taken in the same environs.

‘Despite  his deep sense of privacy, Beckett’s persona has been so widely written about that  it has  become unavoidably mixed up in our imagination with what Bernold  calls his “creatures”. Whether or not Barthes and Foucault were right to dismiss the figure of the author, when confronted with  Vladimir  wincing or Krapp hunched over  his tape recorder or Molloy  resting on his bicycle, one’s  mind always seems to turn to the “gentle  mask” placed over the “severe ossature” that has been immortalized in John Minihan’s  photographs, surely among the most iconic  images  of the  twentieth century. We simply cannot help  it.’ (From the  translator’s preface.)