Beckett and Kenner, Tandem

There are few intellectual encounters as engaging as the most accomplished critic of the age sustaining for 200 pages a brilliant analysis of the subtlest comic imagination of our time. Hugh Kenner has written his best book about Samuel Beckett, just when it would seem improbable that anyone could write a more succinct literary study than Mr. Kenner’s own Wyndham Lewis, or a more beautifully controlled book than his Eliot, or a more conclusive one than his Dublin’s Joyce or a more pioneering one than his Poetry of Ezra Pound. Yet his Beckett, utterly different from these other studies except in the lithe muscle of its prose, takes its place as a masterpiece in the Kenner canon (eight books, 100 essays, a dozen stints as editor of others’ books; age of author, 38; occupation, teacher). And there are rumors of a book to come soon on William Carlos Williams, another on Romantic poetry, another on the entire complex of writing catalyzed by the sixty-year tutelage of Ezra Pound. The critical world has nothing to equal this.

Samuel Beckett, A Critical Study, by Hugh Kenner. Grove Press, $5, cloth; $1.95, paper

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Guy Davenport

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There are few intellectual encounters as engaging as the most accomplished critic of the age sustaining for 200 pages a brilliant analysis of the subtlest comic imagination of our time. Hugh Kenner has written his best book about Samuel Beckett, just when it would seem improbable that anyone could write a more succinct literary study than Mr. Kenner’s own Wyndham Lewis, or a more beautifully controlled book than his Eliot, or a more conclusive one than his Dublin’s Joyce or a more pioneering one than his Poetry of Ezra Pound. Yet his Beckett, utterly different from these other studies except in the lithe muscle of its prose, takes its place as a masterpiece in the Kenner canon (eight books, 100 essays, a dozen stints as editor of others’ books; age of author, 38; occupation, teacher). And there are rumors of a book to come soon on William Carlos Williams, another on Romantic poetry, another on the entire complex of writing catalyzed by the sixty-year tutelage of Ezra Pound. The critical world has nothing to equal this.

Samuel Beckett, A Critical Study, by Hugh Kenner. Grove Press, $5, cloth; $1.95, paper