Refreshingly sensible …

… Beckett: Storming for Beauty by John Banville | The New York Review of Books.

… too many Beckett scholars treat their subject as a secular saint, unworldly and impregnably innocent, a cross between Saint Francis of Assisi and the prophet Jeremiah.3 As is amply demonstrated by the letters so far published—the two volumes of them now in print and the two that are forthcoming represent a modest selection, vigilantly overseen by the Beckett estate, under the control of his nephew Edward, from the many thousands that Beckett wrote in his long lifetime4—he was as eager as any writer to have his work published, and published in a way that would ensure it should reach as wide a readership as possible. Such a desire is not inconsistent with an unwillingness to be thrust into the jaws of the publicity machine that grinds away tirelessly at the center of the literary marketplace.