The challenge of success …

… Stifled by Success by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Cesare Pavese was convinced that any literary success must mean he had compromised his principles in some way, allowed himself to be contaminated. In 1950, shortly after winning Italy’s major literary prize, the Strega, he killed himself, aged forty-one. Reading Beckett’s letters after the first productions of Waiting for Godot, one has the impression of a man determined to deny fans and critics the profound significance they are convinced must lie behind the play. His increasingly cryptic later works look very much like a reaction against success, a determination not to let the public have its much craved symbolism to as he put it, “take away with a choc-ice at the end of the performance.”