Not Reading Beckett

I first read Samuel Beckett during my A-levels when, alongside "Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead" and "Hamlet", we studied "Waiting for Godot." I enjoyed it then, though couldn't quite agree with the university friend who, a couple of years later, felt that it was a masterpiece of comedy. (Everything was a masterpiece with him, or not worth bothering with - a portent of meeting Beckett fans ever since...) Most of the texts I studied at school have remained with me as my literary touchstones - "Othello", "Wuthering Heights", the Metaphysical Poets, "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" - but not Godot. Though not adverse to reading great plays, the writer who writes mainly for stage doesn't, outside of Shakespeare, offer me what I want from literature, even if their use of dramatic narrative, and particularly spoken conversation can be highly persuasive.

I don't recall anyone going on then - this was 25 years ago - of Beckett's genius. I was actually surprised to find he'd written novels and poetry, as well as the plays - as these, if not out of print back then, were certainly never mentioned as literary highlights. Yet in the years since, and particularly since the millennium I can't help but notice that Beckett is the go-to guy for a certain literary intellectual. Is it the Joyce connection? The austere seriousness of the work? (With that comic genius thrown in - as if to say, yes, he's bleak, but he's funny bleak). Or is it something else? A certain literary snobbishness about the last high modernist?

I'll  be honest, Beckett interests me, but I'm in no great hurry to read his collected works. He's very quotable of course, and I guess there's a particularly Beckettian landscape that appeals to a certain type of (almost always male) reader. But like "Monty Python", Radiohead's "OK Computer" or the poetry of J.H. Prynne, just been hammered constantly with the certainty of his genius, is not going to get me rushing to Beckett. The little I've read about him, he seems quite a wry, humorous, private character - yet Beckett's fan club is very offputting to the non-acolyte. He seems to appeal to academics, first and foremost, and particularly those academics in other disciplines. He's the imaginative writer that psychologists can admit to liking. Back to Godot, though, and as revolutionary a work as it no doubt was, I feel now that it is - like the stories of Raymond Carver or Pound's Cantos - of it's time, rather than for all time.

Beckett, of course, was still alive when I was studying him, and it seems a particularly late 20th century condition that writers - rather than seeing a dip in reputation after their death, as used to happen - see a revival, as the literary afterlife (letters, biographies, unfinished works, new editions) gears up for frenetic activity.

I hope to get to Beckett at some point - but I stress he isn't a priority - I get the sense that perhaps his world view and his literary style are of little personal or literary interest to me. (The same feeling I had on finally reading Sebald last year). I feel there's an expectation that I should have read him, and, just as importantly, to rate him highly. Yet not all literary models are universal, particularly ones who are so uniquely "themselves" as Beckett clearly was. Recalling Godot, it seems pretty straightforward to me, for all its orginality, as a drama of the post-war European diaspora - distinctly of its place and time. Beckett's genius was to find a suitable form with which to write about this bleak prospect.