Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett.

Above a darkened stage, a disembodied mouth recites a tale of loss. A blind man drives his servant in harness. A frail couple in nightcaps reminisce from their separate ashcans. Such stark iconography, from the plays of Samuel Beckett, has made the author's name synonymous with nihilism and stoic desperation.

But these images are more than the harvest of a depressed mind, as James Knowlson demonstrates in his masterly biography Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. Beckett had a knack for grim comedy, but he was also a scholar and a connoisseur of high culture, particularly European painting, Knowlson points out, and many of the striking apparitions in his work reflect pictures he most admired. Beckett himself confessed that the imagery in Two Men Contemplating the Moon, a painting by the German artist Caspar David Friedrich, had furnished the germ of the absurdist masterpiece Waiting for Godot. "But there is rarely one simple, single source of inspiration for a literary creation," Knowlson observes, and he goes on to connect Godot to paintings by Jack B. Yeats, the writings of philosophers like Kant and Schopenhauer, and the plays of John Millington Synge and August Strindberg, among others.

Knowlson's sleuthing along the trail of inspiration yields some of the most fascinating passages in this dense but moving volume, which is probably the definitive Beckett biography. Knowlson had already spent two decades studying Beckett's works when the recalcitrant Irish writer chose him as biographer. Reassured that a scholar of Knowlson's caliber would not emphasize the life story at the expense of the works, Beckett acquiesced to weekly interviews over the course of five months, shortly before his death in 1989. Subsequently, Knowlson was able to track down a number of important new sources, including a detailed diary Beckett kept in the mid-1930s. The result is a meticulously thorough portrait that gives as many insights into the aeuvre as it does into Beckett's tension-fraught relationships with people and places.

Born in Ireland in 1906, Beckett left the country more or less for good in his twenties, fleeing a culture he found judgmental and claustrophobic. An aggravating factor was his troubled relationship with his devout Protestant mother, who objected to his early writings, though - rather interestingly - she was open minded enough to pay for two years of psychotherapy for him in London. After a sojourn in Germany, largely spent studying paintings, Beckett moved to France, where he remained for the rest of his life, eventually even writing many of his works in French (partially, Knowlson suggests, to escape the oppressive influence of his countryman, James Joyce). During World War II, he joined the Resistance, translating and collating information from field agents, and narrowly escaped arrest with other members of his cell.

After the war he settled in Paris with his longtime companion, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, whom he eventually married. He had published several works of fiction, including two volumes of a trilogy in French, when his play En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) launched him to success in 1953. The play provoked puzzlement from audiences and critics, but it was remarkable enough to spread quickly to England and America, where it provoked puzzlement from more audiences and critics ("The Left Bank Can Keep It" was the headline of one review). His reputation increased with Fin de partie (Endgame), Krapp's Last Tape, and many shorter plays, some of them for radio; after Godot, he usually wrote in French, and did the English translation himself.

As his celebrity grew so did his discomfort with it; Knowlson's title is a quote from Pope's Dunciad that Beckett took to citing once fame had become a burden. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1969 his publisher wired him, "In spite of everything, they have given you the Nobel Prize - I advise you to go into hiding." Beckett did. Yet he was capable of reaching out to his admirers: in the 1970s he became a friend and mentor to a former prisoner from San Quentin (from the very beginning Beckett's plays have apparently been a favorite with prisoners), supporting him financially and even agreeing to direct productions of the San Quentin Drama Workshop, whose members were prison alumni.

With anecdotes like these, Knowlson demonstrates that a pessimistic vision did not keep Beckett from trying to make the world a better place. He was effusively charitable - he gave away most of the Nobel Prize money - and championed the politically oppressed, in 1982 contributing the play Catastrophe, for example, to a festival supporting the imprisoned Vaclav Havel.

He was equally generous with his time and energy, finding space in his schedule to see friends even when he most wanted to write. And he exerted himself greatly overseeing productions of his plays, fine-tuning performances, and sometimes taking on the role of director. On these occasions he became a perfectionist, insisting that a performer use exactly the right pace or inflection, and even going as far as to bring a metronome to rehearsal. Knowlson astutely relates this scrupulousness to Beckett's artistic eye, noting that, "the attention that Beckett devoted to every element of visual detail of his plays was as minute and painstaking as one of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters that he so much admired."

Beckett's visual imagination was in fact so strong that he sometimes abandoned dialogue altogether: Act without Words I and II, for example, were written for a mime, and Quadrat I and II, conceived for television, feature four dancers dressed in primary colors, processing according to geometrical patterns. Even words were dispensable: his concept of writing, he told Knowlson, lay in the direction of "impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding."

Ultimately, Knowlson can't really explain how Beckett conceived such a daring project, but the expertise and discernment brought to bear in Damned to Fame give us as much insight as we could reasonably expect to get. It is a mark of this biography's achievement that we're left wishing we could meet Beckett and get to know him directly, without the mediation of a book.

Celia Wren is a frequent Commonweal contributor.