ABSTRACT
Reviewing Deirdre Bair's biography, Samuel Beckett, in the Herald Tribune of June 29, 1978, A. J. Leventhal, one of Beckett's oldest and closest friends wrote: Miss Bair tells an extraordinary story of Beckett's first meeting with the woman who was to become his wife. Beckett knows German, and quotes German in his poems and letters. In Beckett's case the matter is even clearer. He is a writer who probes his own consciousness to unprecedented depths and with ruthless honesty. Many of the elements which make up Beckett's inner world into which he introduces us with total frankness are fragments of his real world; many more are imaginary—fantasy or fragments of his erudition.
