The play is the thing, Hamlet says, and I say: naughtiness is the thing. I neither care nor mind what my villains fight for or against, what I am after is their dramatic flair and eccentricity and originality. I prefer the three Metford sisters to the three Marys, Mata Hari to Mother Tereasa, Lady Macbeth to Cordelia, and again as Hamlet says: Villain[s], damned villain[s], and what else! Shall I couple hell?

Pozzo and Hamm, my personal heroes due to their cynicism and scoffing (heroic because they are cynical and cynics because they are heroic) are what mainly attracts me to Samuel Beckett, the rest is quicksand, and because I am a passionate reader of biographies (three excellent reads has Beckett), and biographic writings (his letters to Alan Schneider collected by that Irish TCD professor and your would-be 4-vol collected letters and the conversations by and and about him collected by Mel Gussow), Beckett was lucky in my loving him

SB admired--like me, of course, intellectually-- the Marquis de Sade and his two characters, Pozzo and Hamm, the only villains in the entire works of SB, are obliquely modelled upon some de Sadean attributes. No wonder SB, the timid, coy, meek person he was, indeed the true tsaddik, came under a slight infulence of de Sade because SB suffered Nazi atrocities during WW2. During my visit to him in his office at the University of Reading, Professor John Pilling, the well-established Beckettian--Becketteer, to use Ruby Cohn's coinage of the word--told me a lot about SB's friend Paul Leon who was murdered by the Nazi who were assisted by a Catholic priest. The incident is mentioned in James Knowlson's most recent masterpiece, BECKETT REMEMBERING/REMEMBERING BECKETT. Pilling also told me that SB and wife Suzanne were sought by the Gestapo. In response to my question why shouldnt there be a study of this section of SB's life, Pilling told me there wasnt sufficient documents, and SB himself never elaborated on the subject

In late 1999, I wrote good old Hughie a letter and he didnt respond. Kenner was a Pound expert and I asked him about Caid Ali in one of Pound's longer poems. To PAIDUMA representative in Jordan, Mohammed Shaheen, Ii wrote a letter telling him about my letter to Kenner, and Shaheen informed me that Kenner was in a coma. Later in 2000 in a letter to me, Ruby Cohn broke the news that Kenner had died. Kenner's first book on Beckett in early 1960s is to me still lovably readale. I still read and re-read with relish Kenner's account of his visiting Beckett in his Paris flat, and how, with his head being full of memories of Beckett's Murphy's bicycle, Kenner stumbled on a a rust-stricken bicycle abandoned in Beckett's flat's backyard. My latest re-reading of Kenner's book was during my visit to Ulster University-Coleraine, N Ireland where I was received by Robert Welch, Dean of Faculty of Arts, editor of THE OXFORD COMPANION TO IRISH LITERATURE, and my Leeds University-England supervisor in my MA thesis THE ATTEMPT AT FAILURE: A STUDY OF SAMUEL BECKETT'S PLAYS in 1972. During the last two decades, I have come to prefer biography to criticism, and writers' personal lives to their writings, and if I were given the choice between spending a day with Hamlet or Shakespeare, I would choose Shakespeare, and I therefore agree with George Tabori who died recently in his raising the rhetorical question: Who'd spend a weekend with Hamlet?


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From my experience, and I always make Beckett a household issue with my family--Mrs James Knowlson envyed me for this--it is a bliss to have an invalide in the family. It gives you the feeling that you are living with Beckett who was a sickly person what with stab wounds by that Parisian apache to suffering from constipation and cataracts. How is work in progress of the Samuel Beckett Letters project. By the way, do you think there is an academic and/or monetary gain for me in publishing my LETTER ON SAMUEL BECKETT TO RUBY COHN, signed by me as Siddeek Bakr Tawfeek, the Arab of Beckettia, a copy of which I sent you over three years ago. Because I expect there will be copyright problems with the addressee, Ruby Cohn, I will render the letters into passages or paragraphs and entitle the work MY SAMUEL BECKETT DIARIES and I will change my name from Siddeek Bakr my first two names into Sadique Becker, retaining the same initials SB and with Becker I will keep even nearer to Beckett and at the same time keep closer to my intellectual mentor Sade whom Beckett also admired and even tried his hand at translating one of his novels

Today, August 25th is 58th anniversary of death of May Beckett, our Sam's mother. May was an iron willed woman whose metal withstood Sam's hammers. No wonder Sam made a lot of his characters have names beginning with the letter M, May's initial and the letter is No 13 in the English alphabet. Shawqi Abdul-Amir, an Iraqi who met Beckett in mid-1970s told me that he had a chat in French with Sam during which, Sam, looking intense, said that he wrote WAITING FOR GODOT as, to use TS Eliot's expression, "an objective correlative" to a crisis he was going through caused by a row with his mother May

In Islamic history, circa AD 7th century, Telha, a Moslem fighter came back home defeated in battle. Before stepping into the house, his mother instead of welcoming him, picked up a staff and brandished it at him ordering him to go back and fight until either to come back victorious or dead. Later he fell dead in battle. There are, after all, mothers stronger than May Beckett, Samuel Beckett's mother