L'art pour l'art

According to Britain's leading liberal newspaper, Samuel Beckett has hitherto been viewed as a "poet of pure pessimism, interested in despair and stasis but unconcerned by real-life politics;" evidently his work for the French resistance against the Nazis and subsequent receipt of the Croix de Guerre are even more forgivable and forgettable than his Hibernian roots and his occasional lapses into literary Gallicism. Beckett's private diaries of a sojourn in Germany between the autumn of 1936 and the spring of 1937 are now about to be published, and it seems they demonstrate a healthy alertness to the patriotic pride and the legitimate and understandable concerns which were then trumpeting forth in the consolidating Nazi state. Given the obvious irrelevance of such matters at a time like this, the planned English-language edition will concentrate less on the politics and history than on the author's literary development, thereby tactfully ignoring Beckett's deplorable lack of interest in the period from September 1939 until June 1941, when all the most important bits of the Second World War actually took place.