Bloomsbury £20 pp315

A portrait of the artist as a young man: he was quite the all-round athlete, keen on cross-country running, tennis and boxing, keener still on golf — he’d spend hour after hour alone on the course perfecting his stroke — and a very fine cricketer indeed. (You can look up his name in the pages of Wisden.) When he wasn’t engaged with sports, he liked to zoom around at dangerous speeds on his motorbike, an AJS four-stroke, or to go on long walks with his Kerry Blue terrier. In less strenuous moods, he enjoyed playing chess, singing Victorian hymns or bashing out Gilbert and Sullivan operettas on his old piano, with rather more gusto than skill. He was awfully shy around girls, but still had fun going to “sexy” parties, as he called them, where maidenly eyelashes were fluttered and ankles daringly displayed. In short, he was the sort of normal, healthy chap any regiment would be pleased to make a subaltern. Nobody guessed that Samuel Barclay Beckett would go on to be the author of the most mysterious, idiosyncratic and occasionally terrifying body of work in Western literature.

Had he gone on yet further, rather than dying in 1989, Beckett would have been 100 years old on April 13, and Beckett Remembering: Remembering Beckett is an early harbinger of what will no doubt be a monstrous crowd of tributes and cash-ins. It will almost certainly be one of the more valuable tributes, mainly because it reproduces substantial chunks of a long interview the notoriously tight-lipped author gave to the book’s co-editor, Professor James Knowlson. The fascination this material will hold for Beckett obsessives is hard to exaggerate, though it consists almost entirely of sporting anecdotes such as those repeated above, quaint asides — “I used to play the tin whistle” — and other such trivia. Beckett hardly ever let anything slip about the meaning of his work, and pushy scholars were among the very few people who ever roused his gentle soul to anger.

Beckett’s own cautious revelations are interwoven with contributions from those who knew him, worked with him or simply admired him from afar; the director Anthony Minghella, a self-confessed “Beckett anorak”, was among them. These testimonials vary considerably in merit; one or two are dull, and even the best of them do not hold any real surprises.

The broad outlines of Beckett’s 83 years on our planet remain much as we know them: early academic brilliance as a student of Romance languages; a stint in Paris as part of Joyce’s circle; then a renunciation of the academy, followed by years of poverty, misery and abject failure. He gave heroic service in the French Resistance — though as an Irish citizen he could have stayed safely in Dublin — and in the post-war years wrote on and on in poverty and obscurity until Waiting for Godot brought him unusually rapid fame. Despite the bafflement of some and the indignation of others, the fame spread at dizzying speed. By the 1970s, sober, well-informed people were saying that he was the greatest writer of the later 20th century. He was.

Beckett Remembering: Remembering Beckett is a volume that admirers will seize on hungrily for its details, and for the many photographs interspersed through the text (for the most part they are irritatingly pale and fuzzy: a few proper plates would have been welcome). If there is nothing novel here but the grains of detail . . . well, a sufficient number of grains adds up to a reasonable heap, as the opening of his play Endgame reminds us. Among the things that even the cognoscenti might not know: Beckett’s favourite composer was (who could have guessed it?) Haydn, though he also loved (anybody could have guessed it) Beethoven and Schubert. The only achievement he ever seems to have boasted about was his gift for languages: his French, German and Italian were all but perfect.

The artist Avigdor Arikha recalls that, though he lacked any formal training, his knowledge of the visual arts and his sharpness of eye were both astonishing; he once spotted that a picture in the National Gallery attributed to Mantegna was actually by Bernardino Butinone and, 20 years later, was proved right by the scholars.

If there is one word that dominates these acts of witness, that word is “saint”. Although the writer Nathalie Sarraute notes tartly that “the word ‘grateful’ didn’t seem to be in Beckett’s vocabulary”, and some of his poor, baffled students from Trinity College Dublin report that they found him dull as a lecturer and arrogant as a person, these dissenting notes are few and feeble compared to all of those who speak in awe of Beckett’s unflagging courtesy, humility, compassion, unfeigned interest in others and outstanding, unostentatious generosity: he gave fortunes away to worthy causes and the drinks were always on him.

Sceptics may be tempted to sneer that this whole book of interviews is essentially higher gossip, and has little if any bearing on the nature of Beckett’s incomparable writings. They would be right; but since so much Beckett criticism is merely waffle, and tiresome waffle at that, a spot of decent gossip can be both refreshing and enlightening. I closed the book eager to go back to the masterworks — and to give more money to the homeless.

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