The Sigla Blog

Edna O’Brien has a wonderfully reflective piece on Samuel Beckett in today’s Guardian. She refers to Nino Frank’s description of the time Joyce visited Beckett in a Parisian hospital after Beckett had been stabbed by a pimp as that of “two Irishmen marinating in their respective silences.” However, it’s O’Brien’s own words that make the piece so engaging right from the opening paragraph:

“Sam The Man is the subject of endless myth, disquisition, hearsay, reverence, mystification and bloated anecdote. It would not be unreasonable to suppose that he is now known on the moon, a region he once ruefully regarded as being the preserve of Albert Camus. Many people met Beckett and inevitably drank with him. It is true that he drank quite a lot and is almost certainly truer that he needed to drink, both to vivify a spirit that had “little talent for happiness” and to lessen the barrage of fellow imbibers. All his works are littered with non-stop talkers, the quaquaquas. It seems somewhat precipitate to broach drink concerning such an exigent man, but that triptych of Irish geniuses, Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien, were well-known habitués of the taverns, putting their sojourns to sedulous good use.”