Paul Theroux on Samuel Beckett

"Biographies of [Samuel] Beckett suggest not. You would not know from his work that Beckett was an excellent athlete—cricketer, golfer, swimmer, with a strong forehand in tennis. He loved watching rugby. In his twenties, he was intensively psychoanalyzed. For years, he lived on a stipend from his mother. He took holidays in Tunisia and Morocco. He romanced a number of lovely women—in fact, he had an affair on the go with a young English rose when, at the age of fifty-five, he married his French fiancée. (The love triangle in his later drama Play does not do this situation justice.) He loved to gamble, he played billiards, and, though his work is full of Descartes and Dante, he was a dedicated reader of detective novels—Agatha Christie and many others. Yes, there is a detective in Molloy, and Camier, in Mercier and Camier, is a private investigator, but he solves no crimes.

"Beckett’s essence is in his work, and it is bleak. His life was even grimmer at times—deprivation, the war, his courage in the French resistance, being stabbed by a pimp on a Paris street. But, in many respects, he was more Irish bloke than existentialist, his life much happier and more various and satisfying than you’d guess from his writing, which, by the way (and to his sorrow), his mother denounced as trash."

~~ from The New Yorker's "Facing Ka'ena Point: On Turning Eighty" by Paul Theroux