Happy Birthday, Sam

On April 13, we celebrate the 100th birthday of the unsaintly patron saint of writers, Samuel Beckett, born in Foxrock, near Dublin. Read a fine memory of Beckett in today's Guardian by Edna O'Brien. Here's a typically discerning sample:

"Much is made of Beckett's despairingness, his Cartesian soul nailed to its Cartesian cross, yet he is not a depressing writer, not depressing in the way Henri de Montherlant or Thomas Bernhard can be, because, as with Shakespeare, his darkest words are shot through with beauty and astonishment, his impassioned keenings the best witness that there is to the human plaint, his disgusts brimful with exhilaration. He was a maniac who managed with consummate skill to convert that mania into lasting poetry."

Critics and other readers compelled to demarcate writers by their supposed ideological loyalties (aesthetic, political, ethnic), as though writers swear allegiance to warring tribes, are directed to James Knowlson's biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame, in which he describes a mutually admiring meeting in Paris of the Irishman and Saul Bellow -- prose fiction's chief gifts to the world in the latter half of the 20th century. Writers, more often than putative critics, are the most reliable critics. Beckett loved Humboldt's Gift. Both men answered to one writerly obligation -- to write well.

Savor Christopher Ricks' admonition: "We need Beckett hugely, but not least in his bringing home how much else we need no less."