An Invented Life

Samuel Beckett: A Biography By Deirdre Bair Harcourt Brace, 736 pp., $19.95 The crucifixion of the rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef on Golgotha Hill outside Jerusalem in the 16th year of the reign of Tiberias Caesar was, for the garrison detail that drove the nails, hoisted the cross, and stood guard, so much military routine. They laughed at the pain of the prisoner as a matter of course, the Roman sense of humor running to a coarseness and delight in cruelty that we cannot begin to understand, but they would have laughed even harder if they could have known that their butcher’s work would stand in unmoving time forever, imagined again and again in paint, stone, music, and words, or that almost 2,000 years later an Irish writer named Samuel Beckett would write a play that seems to have nothing to do with the Crucifixion but which has three nails and a hammer half-concealed in the names of its four characters, Hamm, Clov, Nell, and Nagg (hammer, clavus, nail, Nagel).

In the fierceness of his human pain, Christ had cried out to ask why he was forsaken by God. It is that sense of being forsaken that Beckett examines in Endgame. He has changed the tempo of the Passion to slow motion, to a tedious, dripping-faucet pace.

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Guy Davenport

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Samuel Beckett: A Biography By Deirdre Bair Harcourt Brace, 736 pp., $19.95 The crucifixion of the rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef on Golgotha Hill outside Jerusalem in the 16th year of the reign of Tiberias Caesar was, for the garrison detail that drove the nails, hoisted the cross, and stood guard, so much military routine. They laughed at the pain of the prisoner as a matter of course, the Roman sense of humor running to a coarseness and delight in cruelty that we cannot begin to understand, but they would have laughed even harder if they could have known that their butcher’s work would stand in unmoving time forever, imagined again and again in paint, stone, music, and words, or that almost 2,000 years later an Irish writer named Samuel Beckett would write a play that seems to have nothing to do with the Crucifixion but which has three nails and a hammer half-concealed in the names of its four characters, Hamm, Clov, Nell, and Nagg (hammer, clavus, nail, Nagel).

In the fierceness of his human pain, Christ had cried out to ask why he was forsaken by God. It is that sense of being forsaken that Beckett examines in Endgame. He has changed the tempo of the Passion to slow motion, to a tedious, dripping-faucet pace.