Existential ambivalence …

… Beckett two ways by John Simon — The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

There is thus a remarkable self-contradiction or twofoldness—perhaps even a mischievous duplicity—at work in Beckett’s published writings, as well as in these letters, and indeed in his very life. Why else write in two languages: as an Irishman (definitely not Englishman) and as an honorary Frenchman who spent most of his adult life in France, the twofoldness manifest equally in numerous quirks as in major dualities. Beckett could thus never resolve which he needed more, the goings-on in the city or the seclusion of the country, involving residences in both and a continual to and fro. Consider even, as I have been told by persons in the know, his pleasure in taking visitors to the Crazy Horse Saloon but seating himself with his back to the renowned nude dancers.